


what fun it all would be

by 8sword



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Body Horror, Domestic Fluff, Episode: s07e13 The Slice Girls, Eventual Character Death, Fallen!Castiel, Flashbacks, M/M, Purgatory, vampire!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-27 19:52:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/pseuds/8sword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing dies in Purgatory, but they are forever finding corpses. </p><p>A thoroughly jossed S7 coda fic in which Dean and Castiel find Emma in Purgatory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A thoroughly jossed Purgatory fic. Nothing in “Slice Girls” indicated that Amazons eat the flesh of their human fathers to become full-fledged Amazons/survive, but I tweaked that a little here because I’m gross like that. Also, I pretty much dispensed with even an attempt at plot or SPN-accurate vampirism. Please adjust your expectations accordingly. Thanks to loversforlycanthropes for betaing!
> 
> Title from a Led Zeppelin song.

i.

It’s a Tuesday, which means it’s Dad’s turn to pick Emma up from Kid Care. He comes in a few minutes after Keisha’s mom picks her up, looking up and going “oof!” as Emma barrels into him. “C’mon, c’mon, Dad, let’s go!” She yanks at his hand, bouncing from foot to foot as he signs her out in the big binder on the lunchroom table. He takes forever to write his name. It shouldn’t take him that long, Emma knows, because she can write her name faster than this and she has the same number of letters in her name as he does, E-M-M-A W-I-N-C-H-E-S-T-ER, and come on, Dad, can’t he see she’s got news?

“See ya, Jen,” Dad gives a wave to Miss Jenny and then finally lets Emma drag him out the doors. “What’s the rush, kiddo? You late for a hot date?”

“Da-a-a-a-d,” because that doesn’t even deserve a response, really. She tosses her lunchbox into the backseat and clambers into the front, because even if she’s really impatient she’s never going to stop trying to make Dad let her ride in the front seat of the Impala. When he pushes on his sunglasses and gives her an uh-uh look, she huffs loudly and slithers between the front seats to the back.

“I guess if I can’t sit in front I can’t share my Doritos with you,” she informs him as she buckles her seatbelt. She pulls out her lunchbox. Dad always makes fun of her for saving part of her lunch to eat on the ride home, but he usually eats some of it, too.

“I guess you don’t have any Doritos to share, you little troll,” Dad retorts. “Cuz I saw Papa pack your lunch this morning and the only chips I saw in there were made of shriveled-up bananas.”

Emma glowers into her lunchbox, which is indeed devoid of Doritos. The banana chips Papa packed for her still sit there in their snack-sized Ziploc bag, all pale and hard and gross. Papa hasn’t let them buy Doritos in forever, ever since he saw that dumb thing on the news about eating healthy. He keeps buying weird crunchy granola and stuff instead, and it’s like being at Uncle Sam and Aunt Amelia’s house all the time, and “Daaaad, can’t you make Papa let us buy Doritos?”

She hears a rummaging sound in the front seat. Then Dad’s handing her something over his shoulder, a bag—of Doritos! And not even the plain cheesy ones; they're the cool ranch ones she likes.

“Dad!” she shouts in delight.

“Yeah, yeah. Just make sure you lick your fingers clean before we get home,” Dad says, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “And no cheese on the seats!”

 

* * *

 

What with the surprise Doritos, Emma completely forgets about her news, until they get home and Papa’s sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper with a cup of tea next to his hand.

“Don’t even think about it, Emma,” Dad begins, but Emma’s already taking off, getting a running start through the living and leaping into Papa’s lap, right on top of his newspaper.

“Oof!” goes Papa.

Emma smacks a Hi Papa kiss on his cheek, aiming high near his eye, since she doesn’t like his pricklies. “Papa, guess what!”

“Emma, what’ve I told you?” Dad stomps into the kitchen holding Emma’s lunchbox. “You're too bony to go jumping on people. And Cas—” He points accusingly at Papa, “you’re too bony to let her. One of these days, you two're going to impale each other. God, my kid’s a monkey.”

Emma and Papa ignore him. They’re used to Dad yelling when he’s not really angry. “Hello, Emma,” Papa says solemnly, keeping her balanced on his knee with one hand and tugging the newspaper free with the other. He pauses, and looks at her. “Is what you want me to guess that your father gave you Doritos?”

Emma goes open-mouthed. How did he know?

Behind Papa, Dad grins. Then, when Papa turns around to look at him, he changes it to an appalled look (the kind that means he’s so going to throw her under the bus, as Uncle Sam says). “Emma! You’ve been eating Doritos? You know Dad #2 doesn’t like you eating junk food.”

“You gave them to me!” Emma protests, but there are more pressing matters here. She looks at Papa. “How did you know?”

Dad makes a snorting noise like he’s trying not to laugh. Papa looks back at her, shifts her slightly on his lap, away from him. He says delicately, “You smell like them. Perhaps Dad should give you some gum to chew, next time.” He looks at Dad, who’s grinning sneakily as he comes to stand by Papa’s chair.

“Sorry, Dorito Breath,” he tells her, leaning down to give Papa a kiss.

Papa wrinkles his nose as Dad pulls away. “You have Dorito breath too, Dean.”

Dad looks at Emma, who looks back. Then, in unison, they exhale gustily in Papa’s direction.

Papa blinks at both of them long-sufferingly. “How delightful." He gets up, sending Emma sliding off his lap with a yelp. “For that, you can prepare the beans for dinner.”

“What?” Emma and Dad whine in unison. But Papa’s already back from the kitchen with a pot and a bag of green beans, putting them on the table. “The two of you can snap them while Emma tells us her exciting news.”

This cheers Emma up slightly. She climbs onto the chair across from Cas and opens her backpack. “Look!”

The letter’s stapled in her agenda. Ms. Monaghan handed all the letters out today during reading time. She shoves it across the table to Papa, who’s already taking a pen from his pocket to sign off on today’s date for her. He holds the pen cap between his teeth as he begins to read the letter (even though he’s always telling Dad not to do that because pens have germs on them, to which Dad always says, “You think germs are gonna be what finally kills me, Cas?” To which Papa says, “No, I think they will make you ill and cause you to whine to the rest of us about how ill you feel so that we feel bad for you and agree to go buy you a cheeseburger that will only make you feel worse than before.” “That was one time, Cas—” “Twice, Dean. It was twice”).

Dad’s leaning around the table, trying to read the letter with Papa. Papa starts to read it aloud instead, as Emma bounces in excitement on the other side of the table. “Dear parents-slash-guardians. We are excited to inform you that the third grade classes will be attending Elementary Biztown on Tuesday, September 18. This is a day-long workshop held for elementary schoolers in which they are assigned jobs and learn how to act as entrepreneurs, government officials and citizens in a simulated town facility.”

Papa stops. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. They’re already making the children choose their vocations?” He sounds concerned.

“No, it’s like a pretend thing,” Dad replies. “The kids all get pretend jobs with fake pay and stuff, and they get to go buy stuff with their fake money to teach them how to budget and write checks and stuff.” He elbows Papa. “You would’ve benefited from something like this, actually.”

“It does sound as if it would have been helpful,” Papa says. “This sounds very educational, Emma. Would you like one of us to chaperone?”

Emma nearly dies of horror. “No! The whole point is to be grown up, I don’t want you guys there treating me like a baby!”

“Hey, I don’t treat you like a baby.” Dad looks offended for a minute, then goes back to looking at the brochure that came with the letter, grinning. “Dude, I remember Sam doing one of these when he was in grade school. He got assigned to be a custodian, he was so mad.”

“Why?” Papa asks. “Custodians are invaluable to the function of any workplace.”

Dad snorts again and ruffles Papa’s hair. “Only you, Cas,” he says affectionately, and looks over at Emma. “I think exciting news like this calls for pizza. Do you think it calls for pizza?”

Emma’s response is to give Papa the biggest, saddest, Uncle Sammiest puppy dog eyes she can manage.

Papa puts a hand to his face, shakes his head. “Fine,” he relents, and when Emma whoops, “But it has to have wheat crust.”

“Whoah, hey, I didn’t sign up for that,” Emma hears Dad say as she tromps upstairs to put her backpack away.

 

\- o -

 

Nothing dies in Purgatory, but they are forever finding corpses. Dean doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the first time he trips over his own dead body, falling hard in the wet carpet of leaves and catching himself on a hand thrown heavily into something soft that gives under his weight. He looks down and sees blank eyes staring past him up at the tree cover. Familiar blank eyes, his own, protruding from a rotting mess of face.

There are no flies in purgatory to eat the soft parts of the dead, the eyes and the tongue and the other parts that usually go first. It looks like they just start to liquefy instead.

“Holy shit,” he says, voice shaking more than he’ll ever admit. He looks at Cas, instead of his own fucking corpse. “Is that…?”

He’s only been alive again for a few days. He’d bled out after a fucking vetala, of all things, got the drop on while he was trying to find Cas. Imagine his surprise at watching everything go black and then waking, some indeterminable amount of time later, to Cas’s face floating extra-clearly above him, like the knock to the head had made everything go high-definition, and no blood or marks at all on his chest.

“You?” Cas says. He looks grave, but then what else is new. He looks tired, which would have been new once but hadn’t been in a long time. “Yes.”

“Like…shifter me?” It’s been over 40 years since then, in Dean-time, but Dean will probably never forget what it felt to barge into that chick’s house and see himself strangling Sammy. “He ended up here, right?”

“This is you,” Cas says. “Look at the coat.”

Dean looks. The—him—is wearing his new jacket, the preppy one Sam grabbed for him after Dad’s got left behind in that stupid junker. And part of his anti-possession tattoo is visible through the gory mess of mauled shoulder. He hadn’t had that yet when the shifter took him.

“So I…” He looks at himself, remembered spirit-walking with that kid when Alastair tried to break the seal with the reapers. “I’m dead? Actually?”

“Dean.” Cas is looking at him with the look he always gets when he doesn’t understand why Dean’s making a big deal out of something. “The vetala killed you.”

“Yeah, but—” Dean spreads his arms. “Look at me. Still kicking here, Cas.”

Cas is still frowning his troubled Dean-is-being-particularly-human-today frown. “Dean. I told you that this is where things which are not human come to prey upon each other for all eternity.”

“…and?”

“How do you think they prey upon each other for all eternity if they stay dead when they are killed?”

”Yeah, because that makes so much sense, Cas,” Dean says flippantly. But his guts are twisting. “Thing is, I’m not a monster. I’m not a shifter, or…”

Cas is watching him silently. His you-know-why gaze answers a question Dean has always sort of had, and never wanted to ask, because, you know, he’d been right, he hadn’t wanted to know that Cas had known. You knew that soulless son of a bitch let me get turned and you didn’t do anything about it. That had been a different Cas, maybe, and it had been a different Sam, too, and now it’s a different Dean, thanks to both of them, and he isn’t going to think about this now, goddamnit. “Got it. Great. So—get turned into a bloodsucker once, and you’re screwed for eternity. Awesome.” He grips the knife in his hand more tightly, looks down at old-him’s caved-in face without looking at it.

“If we leave this behind it’s going to get eaten, isn’t it.”

Cas is shifting from foot to foot. His gaze has gone to the dark trees behind Dean. “Eventually.”

And they don’t have anything to set it on fire with, even if they could afford to reveal their location like that. Dean momentarily considers taking the time to bury it, abandons the idea when a howl comes through the trees behind him, still a good distance away but probably not for long.

They run.

 

\- o -

 

For Biztown, the kids in Emma’s class have to wear what Mrs. Mahon calls “mature clothing,” which makes Dad snort and spew out his coffee when he reads it in the letter that comes with Emma’s permission slip.

“Dean, really,” Papa says dryly.

Dad grins, wipes his mouth. “Guess that means you gotta go shopping, huh?” he says to Emma. “I bet Aunt Amelia’ll die of happiness to take you shopping for fancy girl stuff.”

Emma has other ideas. Auntie A’s great, but she always asks Emma, “Are you sure that’s what you want?” like she thinks Emma should choose something else instead. But Emma already has an outfit in mind. Luckily, there’s one person she can always count on not to argue with her fashion sense. “But I want Papa to take me.”

Dad blinks. Papa just takes a last sip of his tea and says, “All right.” He stands up and goes to pull on his jacket.

“Hey, Emma,” Dad says loudly, eyes twinkling. “Don’t let Papa talk you into buying a trench coat, okay?”

Papa comes back into the kitchen with Emma’s jacket. “If only you were as funny as you think you are, Dean.”

“Whatever, you think I’m adorable,” Dad says.

Emma’s frowning. “I remember your trench coat.” It’s a blurry memory, kind of like when she tries to remember being a baby (Andrew Cooper told everyone at lunch the other day that he could remember coming out of his mommy’s belly, but Mason said he was lying because babies don’t even grow eyeballs until they’re a week old, and Mason always gets A’s in Science, so Emma believes him), but she’s pretty sure she can remember Papa wearing something soft and khaki that had a lot of loose threads that tickled her nose.

Dad and Papa are giving each other Father Looks. “Yeah?” Dad says. “You remember that?”

“I guess a little,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t think it smelled very good.” She steps into her favorite galoshes, clomps crookedly to the door. “Hey, Papa, if I’m good, can we get Chinese at the mall?”

 

\- o -

 

It should have been a relief. Right? Coming back to life every time he died. Like an endless get-out-of-jail-free card that he sure as hell needs because there’s no downtime in Purgatory, monsters springing from above, below, and every freaking 360 degrees around him.

Of course it isn’t that simple.

They never know where Purgatory’s going to vomit out his newest body. Sometimes Dean comes to in a tangle of tree roots, sometimes thrashes his way up out of scalding pits of tar and gore, other times crawls up out of dirt, scrabbling for a grip among wet rotting leaves. It’s inconvenient, and it’s slow, because Cas has to find him again every time, but Dean realizes it’s good, in a way, because it means he doesn’t have to wake up in a new body next to his old one as it gets its heart gobbled out of its ribcage by the fucking werewolf he’s doing to tear apart the next time he catches its fucking scent.

Cas gets to watch, instead, and how fucking weird is that, looking at the new blood all over Cas’s trench coat and knowing it’s his. Only not. And maybe Dean blurts out something to that effect, trying to fill in the silence that stretches taut between them like a carcass bloated full to bursting by its own gas, looking at the blood and the gobs of guts because they’re easier to see than the look in Cas’s eyes as darkness spreads across Dean’s vision again.

Maybe, he thinks as he blinks and floats up toward a filmy green surface, Cas wised up this time. Maybe he left instead of staying to watch Dean’s empty body get ripped apart. Maybe he’ll be at the surface of whatever this water is, already waiting for Dean—

His head breaks the surface. His throat drags down a mouthful of air and filthy water. He blinks through the water streaming down his face, sees he’s in some kind of brackish river ringed with some sort of cypress trees. The water’s green and cloudy, too dirty to see anything, and he swims quickly for the bank, new heart pounding, every sense strained for teeth to close around his ankle, his leg, and drag him down. He makes it to the shallows, then the shore itself, slime dripping into every part of him, his eyes, his ears, the crack of his ass. He gnashes in teeth in rage that he’s let himself get fucking killed again, and forces himself to his feet, shakes himself out like a dog, trying to get the slime off. Further downstream, there’s water is moving a little faster, clearer; he heads toward it to sluice off some of the gunk, moving more stealthily than someone so wet should be able to as he scents the air for any hint of Cas or monsters nearby.

That should have been his hint. The scenting thing. It’s not, it’s not until he’s hissing in displeasure at his blurry reflection in the river water and sees the second row of teeth that he realizes.

 

\- o -

 

“What did I look like when I was born?”

Dad and Papa exchange glances.

“You didn’t open your eyes for a while,” Papa says finally. “It…scared us.”

Emma tilts her head. “Why? Was I sick?”

“Nah, just lazy,” Dean says. “You didn’t bother opening your eyes until we finally got some food in you. Better than Sam. You know what he did when it was my turn to hold after he was born?”

Emma has heard this story before. “He farted!”

“Damn right he did!” Dad says, indignant. “Right in my face. And he’s been doing it ever since. God, sometimes I feel like that lame dude from Adventure Time.”

“My life is like a fart!” Emma exclaims in delight. “Ghost Princess” is one of her favorite Adventure Time episodes. She’s pretty sure it’s Dad’s too. Except he really likes the episodes with Tree Trunks, too, because Tree Trunks is always making apple pie for Finn and Jake.

Papa is shaking his head, smiling into his tea cup. Dad sees him and says, “Dude. There is nothing funny about Sam’s gas.”

“I am unfortunately aware of that fact,” Papa says. “I’m merely amused by your allusion to a show you insisted was—” He crooks his fingers and lowers his voice to sound like Dad’s, ” ‘complete crap.’ “

“Eh. Well,” Dad says, scratching his head. “Turns out it’s actually pretty funny.”

“Damn right!” Emma says.

Papa sighs. Dad grins. Then sobers when Papa shoots him a Look. Emma decides it’s a good idea to change the subject.

“If I was Auntie A, I think I’d have to divorce Uncle Sam,” she decides. “Between him and JB, that is just too much farting.”

Papa rolls his eyes heavenward, like Are we really having this conversation?

Dad grins and says, “Maybe Amelia does it too and that’s why she doesn’t complain.”

Emma bursts into laughter.

Papa clears his throat. “It’s not very respectful of you two to talk that way about someone who has done so much for you.”

“Come oooon, lighten up,” Dad says, leaning back and kicking his feet up on the empty chair. “Everyone lets one rip sometimes, it’s part of being human.”

Emma thinks for a minute as Papa looks at Dad in that way Emma often has to put up with them looking at each other. She has gotten used to interrupting it, which is what she does now: “Hey, Papa, how come you never fart?”

Now it’s Dad’s turn to guffaw. “Yeah, Cas, how come?” he says.

“We are not having this conversation,” Papa says loftily and determinedly ignores them—and the Whoopie cushions they stealthily plant under his spot on the couch—for the rest of the night.

 

\- o -

 

They find the werewolf. Dean’s not sure if he was looking for it. Not sure how he kills it, either. Just comes back to himself, heaving, growling, sweeping sour blood from his teeth with his tongue.

 

\- o -

 

_You’re a good man. My mother told me that._

_I seriously doubt she said that. And if you knew me, you would seriously doubt it’s true._

 

 

 

 

* * *

Note: I found an [AMAZING post](http://the-little-blue-bird.tumblr.com/post/60352585486/cas-this-is-my-this-is-emma-hi-dad-did-you) by [the-little-blue-bird](http://the-little-blue-bird.tumblr.com/) on tumblr that gave me such strong feels concerning this fic....AGH, I can't even verbalize them. Please check it out! 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

ii.

Emma’s got a birthmark on her wrist that kind of looks like a spider. It’s ugly and sometimes it itches, and her cousin J.B. says it’s probably a sign she’s an alien and the mother ship’ll be back to pick her up any day now. Dad says if anyone’s an alien, it’s J.B., except when the mother ship comes to get him they won’t be able to find him under all that girly hair. Emma laughs, but she still feels kind of scared, so when Dad’s tucking her in that night, he sits on her bed and looks at her for a minute. Then he says, “I’m gonna show you something.”

He shrugs off his over shirt and rolls up the sleeve of the t-shirt he’s wearing underneath. There’s a big ugly mark there, pink and white and melted-looking. It’s not spider-shaped, it looks kind of like the finger-paint turkeys they made at school for Thanksgiving by painting their hands and pressing them onto paper.

“Ewww, Dad!” she exclaims, wriggling out of her blankets to inspect it. It’s simultaneously gross and fascinating, like the worms she finds wriggling on the sidewalk after it’s rained really hard. “Where’d you get it?”

Dad says, “Secret,” and rolls his sleeve back down. Then he wrestles her back under the covers, tickling her armpits when she tries to escape. Pretty soon she’s shrieking with laughter, and Dad’s trapping her in her blanket, rolling her up like a hot dog. “Time for Ballpark Franks to go to sleep!”

Emma makes one more bid for freedom, flopping in her cocoon, then collapses onto her side. She’s still breathless from laughing so hard as Dad goes to turn off her lamp.

Then something occurs to her. “Dad!”

He glances up at her, still smiling. “What, baby girl?”

“Does Papa have one too?”

Dad’s still for a minute. Then he says, “Sure he does. It’s in the shape of a My Little Pony, just like Uncle Sam’s.”

“Daaaad.”

He snickers and squeezes her foot through the blankets. “Go to sleep, kid.”

 

\- o -

 

After a hunt—Dean can’t remember which one anymore, thinks maybe it was that weird wishing well case with the Sandwich of a Thousand Upchucks—Sam started nagging him to use that lame-ass alcohol hand sanitizer crap from those chick stores in the mall. He went on a soapbox—ha—about how regular soap doesn’t kill all the crap they had on their hands from grave digging and all that shit, had this whole Stanford explanation about how hand soap didn’t get rid of things all the way, just killed the weakest germs, and the ones that can survive it just keep living, over and over, a Battle Royale of bacteria, until the only ones left on you are the leanest and meanest, the most dangerous.

Here in Purgatory, the weakest parts of Dean are getting killed off and left behind so only the ones best able to survive remain. It’s why his lips don’t bleed from the extra layer of teeth anymore, when before they used to chafe. It’s why he’s not dying half as often as he used to, moving too fast and too vicious to be killed before he kills first. It’s why he’s always thirsty now, no matter how many stagnant ponds they find, gulping greedily until the front of his shirt is soaked, hanging heavy and sopping against his skin. Always wanting something else. Something more.

Beside him, Cas crouches at the stream’s edge, and exhales.

 

\- o -

 

Sometimes Dad doesn’t pick Emma up from Kid Care. Sometimes Papa comes instead, looking tired and faintly puzzled as he signs the paper in the big white binder. He always holds Emma’s lunchbox for her and lets her sit in the front seat of the car and choose what CD to listen to.

Emma knows what that means. It means that when they get home she’ll be able to hear Dad throwing up in the bathroom. Or the clank of his tools in the backyard and angry scraping sounds, harsh breaths. No scratchy music from the radio that usually plays when Dad’s working on the cars, no voice singing, Then what’s to stop us, pretty baby under his breath.

Or maybe the driveway will be empty, and Dad won’t be home at all. His chair at the table will be empty when they eat dinner, and he won’t be home to make funny sentences with Emma’s spelling words or see who can make the most toothpaste foam when it’s time for Emma to brush her teeth for bed. And Papa will read an extra chapter of her book to her at bedtime and pretend not to notice that Emma’s bedtime has come and gone, and they’ll both pay more attention to the open window than the story, listening for the Impala to rumble up the driveway.

And Emma will eventually fall asleep, wondering if this will be the time that Dad doesn’t come home.

 

\- o -

 

Dean’s started calling ‘em Trees of Life. He and Cas find them pretty often, maybe every ten miles or so: huge sprawling trees in the middle of the forest that have a whole nest of roots slithering up out of the ground around them. They always knows when they’re getting close to one because of the smell, and sometimes the sounds. There’re bodies crammed inside the nooks and crannies made by the roots, new bodies uncurling and crawling up out of the cracks, and dead ones rotting still all curled-up, like instead of crawling out they just decided to stay put, and die. They’re wrinkled and misshapen, full-sized aborted fetuses that didn’t come to life right, or at all.

They avoid the trees when they can, trek around to give them a wide berth. But this one’s sprawled across the path, bordered by a steep drop into a ravine, and there’s no moaning or growling coming from it like something dangerous is in the process of pulling itself to life. So they pick their way through the roots, Dean taking point and watching the ground beneath his boots, looking for anything that looks like it’s above to move, to pop its crusty eyes open and lunge for him.

He’s so careful avoiding a nasty-ass wrist-spear-thing protruding from the decaying hand of what must’ve been a wraith that he nearly steps on a tiny hand.

A really tiny hand.

Curiosity gets you killed in Purgatory, Dean knows that from experience. But fuck if he’s seen anything this small in the months—years?—they’ve been here. He compromises, doesn’t crouch to look at whatever it is but uses his boot to toe away some of the matted leaves covering it.

It’s a kid in the roots, or looks to be, maybe two or three. The eyes are sunken, and there’s dark streaks spreading from its mouth and eyes, like rot under the skin. Its clothes and hair are so caked with dirt he can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a girl or a boy. He’s thinking boy, thinking about Amy’s kid with his stricken eyes and how Dean left him to get gutted by some other predator because he hadn’t had the guts to knife the kid himself, like it somehow made a difference, not having the kid’s blood on his hands when he had his mother’s. He’s thinking, fuck, I don’t want to see this, and inhaling, and stepping past the tiny corpse.

Cas doesn’t move with him. Dean realizes the near-silent whisper of the angel’s hospital clogs through the leaves isn’t following only a few seconds after the fact, turns to growl, “Pick up the pace, Cas.”

But Cas has stopped where Dean was. He’s staring down at the kid, he’s got that wide-eyed look he got the first time Dean took him to that whorehouse, and maybe it would make Dean crack something like a smile to remember that if this wasn’t so fucking messed-up, if Cas wasn’t crouchingto put his hand to the fucking corpse.

“Cas!” He’s back at the angel’s side in an instant, grabbing to wrench his wrist back because you don’t fucking touch these things, they rear up and nab you (and he can feel Cas’s pulse in that bit of wrist, strong and wet, and he swallows back hot saliva, forces himself to concentrate) but in the moment of distraction Cas has traced his finger down the small dirty hand. Dean has a minute to flash back to that dark room in the mental ward, the sparks showering down atop them, and think that Cas really has gone cracked, he’s wanting dead things to pull his finger now—

Then the hand twitches, and curls around Cas’s finger.

Dean’s hand goes tight on Cas’s shoulder, the other around his makeshift knife. But Cas isn’t pulling back, though he’s staring at the hand around his finger with something like horror, and the body—kid—thing—hasn’t moved aside from that one reflexive motion.

“Cas,” Dean says, low, like he doesn’t want to wake the thing up. “What is it?” Cas doesn’t have much of his angel mojo anymore, but usually he’s got enough to be able to tell what they’re dealing with, and to remember how to kill it.

Cas looks up over his shoulder at him. There’s something swimming behind his eyes, something like sadness and something like pity and something like you don’t think you deserve to be saved, and Dean’s hand falls from his shoulder. “Not something we’re going to kill,” he rasps, and then he’s reaching into the leaves, lifting the small body out of the roots. Leaves and other things fall from it; Dean realizes they’re worms and maggots, sees more of them crawling in the thing’s hair, falling now onto Cas’s collar, some clinging to his dirty coat.

“Cas,” he says. “We can’t just—”

Cas doesn’t say anything, just starts down the path again with the bundle in his arms.

 

\- o -

 

When they stop that night, Cas volunteers to take first watch. Dean pretends to let him, curling up on his side with his back to Cas and the newest thing he’s lifted from perdition, and thinks yeah, right, like hell is he having anything but a two-handed grip on consciousness (and his knife) while that thing’s with them.

He lies awake for minutes in the darkness, then hours, running his tongue over his teeth and feigning sleep, listening for any sound below the rustle of cold wind through leaves. Finally he hears Cas shift, a tiny intake of breath.

“I don’t know you,” he murmurs so quietly Dean has to stop breathing to hear, “or how you came to be. But surely this is not where you are meant to be.”

There’s no response from the creature, at least nothing Dean can hear.

“Please wake up.” Cas’s voice is barely more than a breath.

Again, nothing, but then Dean hears something. A whisper of metal, a tiny intake of air. A faint, heady smell. And he’s rolling over without realizing it, shoving upright, mouth open. Cas has his sleeve pushed up, a neat cut on his wrist weeping blood, and he’s trying to drip it onto the thing’s slack lips.

“The hell are you doing?” He’s at Cas’s side in a second, snatching his wrist back.

Cas looks up, gives Dean a I will smite you look that brings heat rushing to his core and a reflexive snarl to his lips. “Release me.”

“Did it hypnotize you? Is it some kind of wraith?” Dean’s got his teeth bared, is scanning the thing’s hands for any sign of wraith-spikes, mentally running through all the monsters he knows that can hypnotize their victims and peripherally worrying at how little grace Cas must have left if he’s vulnerable to mind-control by two-bit monsters.

“I am not under any outside control,” Cas says stiffly. “This child is important, Dean.”

The last child Cas gave a shit about was the Anti-Christ, and he’d tried to kill him. This one he’s trying to keep alive? “Important to who?”

“To me,” Cas says shortly, and turns away, the thing cradled in his coat.

 

\- o -

 

Papa must notice her glum expression the minute she trudges into the house after Dad, because he puts down his pen and opens his arms. Emma stomps over to them and climbs into his lap, mashing her forehead against his so that their eyes are right in front of each other, and frowns.

“Papa,” she says unhappily.

“Emma,” he says back. “Why are you upset?”

“Ms. Mahon made me an ad executive. I have to sell commercials for the radio.”

Behind them, Dad lets out a snort of laughter. Emma does not understand why Dad is forever being amused by things that make Emma angry. Uncle Sam says he has the same problem and that it’s because Dad’s brain is hooked up weird. Emma doesn’t like when Uncle Sam says this about her dad, but sometimes she thinks it’s true. Like now.

“Don’t laugh!” she shouts at him, then goes back to Papa, who is still watching her sympathetically from an inch away.

“I don’t want to be an ad executive,” she whines to him. “I wanted to be a Biggerson’s waitress!”

More laughter from the kitchen. And now Papa doesn’t look sympathetic so much as puzzled. His head is tilted. “Why did you want to be a Biggerson’s waitress?”

“Because,” Emma says impatiently, all honestly, Papa, keep up with the conversation, “if the kids who work at Biggerson’s make too much food and have leftovers at the end of the day, they get to eat them! I wanted to work at Biggerson’s!”

Papa is smiling. His eyes are crinkled up at the corners, and he is shaking his head slightly. “Emma, my Emma,” he says. “You are truly your father’s daughter.”

Emma snuggles comfortably under his chin. Then thinks of something, cranes her head back to look up at him. “And Papa’s too?”

Papa just smiles softly and presses a kiss to her head.

 

\- o -

 

Dean doesn’t ask anything more after that. Doesn’t let his guard down, either, the next night, or the next, when Cas whispers to (pleads with) the creature, and the smell of blood wafts into the air, and Dean pretends the tension thrumming through him is from knowing any Tom, Dick, or Jefferson Starship could scent it and come crashing down on them for it. That the quiver in his muscles and the saliva coursing to his mouth is in preparation for a fight. Nothing else.

But it starts to drive him crazy. He wants so badly. He can’t keep lying taut as a bowstring, smelling Cas’s blood and hearing his frustrated exhalations of “Why won’t you take it?”

And that night when the first salty-sweet seeps into the air, he sits upright, is across the campsite to Cas before he even realizes he’s done it. His blood is pounding, his mouth tastes hot and wet. He’s snarling, “What even makes you think your blood is going to help her?”

Cas looks too tired to glare back. He’s barely spoken these past few days, eyes glazed and mouth tight. It’s a far cry from the piercing stare Dean’s used to (misses), that he had even when Cas was holding up the board game and saying Would you like to go first?

“I don’t know that it will,” he rasps finally. “Angel blood may be…unpalatable, to a creature such as her. But she needs something. She’s dying.”

Dean’s tongue traces his teeth. “Big deal, around here.”

Cas shoots him a look that’s angry and disappointed at the same time, and Dean snorts, looks away. Watches from the corner of his eye as Cas returns his attention to the thing’s face. He’d gotten some water the day before, wiped most of the grime from its face and out of its hair, and it looks almost human now, bow-shaped lips and a tiny nose. But the dark streaks under the skin and the pits of its eyes have gotten, if anything, darker and deeper. It still grasps Cas’s finger, and Dean wonders for the first time if it, or Cas, have let go at all since it first latched on.

He turns back to face Cas. “Lemme try.”

Cas looks up. Studies him for a moment. Dean feels with sudden acuity the extra ridge of teeth under his gums, the unnatural detail with which he can see Cas’s eyelashes and chapped lips in the darkness. Monster.

Cas carefully shifts the child into Dean’s arms.

A tremble shudders through it the moment its head touches his elbow. It keeps shaking, violently, as he tightens his hold so it doesn’t fall. He’s suddenly one hundred percent positive he’s going to break it, fuck, he hasn’t held a kid this little since Bobby John, and yeah, look how that turned out, and there’s another memory pushing at his mind, and he’s shoving it back, doesn’t want to fucking think about that.

“You sure don’t smell like a girl,” he tells it, trying to be whatthefuckever casual about this. He licks his thumb relatively clean, touches it to one of his canines and doesn’t think about what it means that even his human teeth are sharp enough to draw blood.

It’s trembling fit to thrash out of his grip now, reminds him of the werebat he hunted once with Dad, having his arms wrapped around it to keep it from taking off and feeling its powerful muscles heave against him, like holding a giant snake, a giant cockroach, all the things you’d never want to have close to your face. Dean grits his teeth and touches his bloody thumb to the small mouth.

It pulls away, letting out a weak, reedy cry. He feels a flash of hot, stupid shame, wondering what the fuck else he’d thought it was going to do, anyway. He goes to shove it back at Cas. But then he feels a sting, and suction, on his thumb. He looks down the see the kid’s mouth latched around it, sucking greedily. The hand it hadn’t loosed from Cas’s finger for days is curled around his thumb now, tiny and wanting.

He looks at Cas. A weird feeling is spreading through him, almost like pride, like Look, Cas, no hands.

And for a minute, Cas stares back at him like he used to.


	3. Chapter 3

**summary** : When Dean comes to the next time, the first thing he notices, after the hot venom pooling under his tongue, are the long claws curving from his fingers.

 **pairing** : Dean/Castiel

 **warnings:** language, violence, gore, suggestive situations, eventual character death

 

  
**iii.**  

            She’d never tell Dad ‘cause it would hurt his feelings, but Emma likes Papa’s work best. You have to climb practically a thousand stairs to get up to it and then go through a dark hallway that feels like the inside of a castle. Then you finally get to Papa’s office, which is full of books and has a window that’s really high and there’s always pigeons strutting around on the sill, and Emma loves to rap on the glass with her windows and make faces at them. Most of the time Papa lets her, except when he gives her a sad look because he’s working on something and would like her to be a little quieter please, Emma.

            Sometimes Papa lets her sit in his desk chair at his computer while he discusses things with the students who come to see him, and Emma swivels around in it while they talk, except when Mariela comes, because Mariela is super-pretty and wears glittery scarves and Emma is going to be just like her when she grows up. So she makes sure to act extra  _sophisticated_  when Mariela comes and doesn’t swing in the chair like a little kid and pays attention like she can understand what Papa and Mariela are saying, Papa easily and Mariela very slowly and carefully. Sometimes she actually can, because Papa’s been teaching her words at dinner, and now she can say, “I am eight years old,” in French and Spanish and another language that Papa doesn’t speak with anyone but her.

            (Dad taught her how to say it in Pig Latin. “Oink oink snort,” he said, tickling her knee, and Emma laughed so hard she choked on a fry and Papa had to pat her back until it came out.)

            The  _best_  part of Papa’s job at the college is the party they have at the beginning of every school year. It’s for all the professors like Papa—-“the boring stuffy ones,” Dad always says—to get together to welcome their new students and let them network. Emma’s not sure what this means, but the professors’ families come, and a bunch of Papa’s students, and they all tell Emma how pretty she is and let her hang out with them like she’s a big girl, and she loves it.

            She’s had her outfit planned for  _forever_  now, Auntie A helped her pick it out one of the times Emma went to the mall with her and J.B. and Uncle Sam. So she’s a little smug when Dad and Papa are still running around trying to figure out what to wear.

            “I’m glad  _I_ ‘m not the reason we’ll be late to Papa’s work,” she says loudly. Dad throws one of his gross sweaty work shirts at her head. It knocks her fedora off, and she screeches, “DAD!” because it took her  _forever_ to make it tilt like that without falling off.

            “Dean,” says Papa from the bathroom where he’s shaving his pricklies, “be nice.”

            “Yeah,  _Dad_!” Emma says with a glare, jumping up and wriggling her way between Papa and the bathroom mirror to fix her hat. Papa gives her a Look, and she gives him a grin and a big huuuug around the waist, then traipses back out into Papa and Daddy’s room, where she stops in horror.

            “Dad! You can’t wear  _flannel_  to Papa’s party! You’ll embarrass him!” She looks over her shoulder for support. “Right, Papa?”

            Papa frowns at her as he fastens the last few buttons of his nice blue shirt. “Your father should wear whatever he feels most comfortable in.”

            He looks past her to Dad, who looks suddenly uneasy and has stopped buttoning up his own shirt.

            “No, I can… I can wear something different,” Dad says, looking down at the fabric and smiling kinda weird. “Pick out something good for me, huh, Emma?”

            This is the opportunity Emma’s been waiting for; she lunges for her dad’s closet to give him a makeover.

            But Papa says sharply, “Emma.” His voice is solemn, like when he’s talking to students who aren’t doing well in his class, and Emma shrinks a little. She looks at him, and his face is almost disappointed.

            “Please go put your shoes on,” he says quietly.

            Emma slinks out to the living room and laces up her boots slowly, straining her ears to hear what the low rumble of Dad and Papa’s voices in the bedroom are saying. She feels nervous and a little sick and suddenly not very excited about the party. She’s remembering how Dad’s smile looked, like it was careful and not really real. She’s remembering how one time at recess Savannah Elton told everyone Emma’s nose looked like a pig’s and Emma just laughed at her like she didn’t care but when she got into the Impala after school that day she cried.

            When Dad and Papa come out of their room a few minutes later, Emma jumps up to throw her arms around Dad’s waist and whispers, “Sorry, Daddy,” into his jeans.

            There’s a pause, and then he pats her head, awkwardly. That’s when Emma realizes that his jeans don’t smell like car oil like they usually do. She cranes her head back and sees he’s wearing nice jeans, not any of his usual hole-y ones. And he’s wearing his nice leather jacket over one of his Zeppelin shirts instead of the flannel he was wearing before. The last time Dad came to pick her up from school wearing that jacket, Emma heard Mrs. Mahon tell Miss Bramble it made him look really hot, so Emma declares against his waist, “You look really hot in that jacket, Dad!”

            Dad’s uncomfortable face becomes a grin that crinkles his eyes like when Papa comes into the kitchen in the morning with his hair sticking up everywhere. Emma’s insides suddenly feels really light, like she’s not going to be sick anymore, and she hugs Dad’s waist again, tightly.

            He untangles her and picks her up, saying, “C’mere, octopus,” and she says, “Wait, wait,” and turns up his jacket collar to make it look  _really_  cool, like the kids on Disney Channel.

            Dad groans. “Seriously, Emma?”

            A throat gets cleared behind them. “Do  _I_  meet with your approval, Emma?” Papa says in one of his dry voices. Emma looks at him, a little nervous, but his eyes are soft, so she leans back in Dad’s arms to pretend to look him over.

            “I guess,” she sighs long-sufferingly. “You would look better if you hadn’t missed a bunch of your pricklies.”

            Dad barks out a laugh. Then he says, “You know what I think you need, Cas?” Papa tilts his head, and Dad laughs again, then grabs Emma’s hat from her head. “A hat.”

            Papa lets out a surprised laugh as Dad plops it onto his head, which makes Emma and Dad grin. They spend the next ten minutes taking turns trying on Emma’s fedora and seeing who can get the messiest hair, and they end up being late to Papa’s party after all.

 

\- o -

 

            Dean half expects—okay, more like ninety percent expects—the kid to try to suck him dry. But she stops after only a minute or so, pulls away. She makes a little sigh that sounds kind of bummed, but she already looks warmer, like some sort of magic’s made her closed eyes a little less sunken than before. Dean pretends not to care and gives her back to Cas, who gives him an  _are you sure_? look that Dean ignores.

            “Guess angel juice ain’t her cup of tea,” he says with a shrug and curls up again in his pile of leaves, back to Cas. He chews down on his thumbnail for a moment, feeling the indentation of tiny teeth and the salt of his own blood.

            He takes her again in the morning without being asked, or offering, to feed her. It becomes sort of a habit, before they get going in the morning and when they make camp at night. After a few days, she almost looks like a normal human two year-old, the weird black streaks gone from under her skin even though she still hasn’t opened her eyes and spends most of the time sleeping, or chewing on Cas’s coat. But she still tenses when Dean takes hold of her, skittish like a dog afraid it’s going to get thwapped with a newspaper, and it makes Dean simultaneously uncomfortable and reassured, because even if Cas seems to have forgotten she’s a monster and Dean’s starting to get stupidly close to forgetting it himself,  _she_  hasn’t, still knows that she’s a threat to Dean and he to her. It tastes like bared throats and long curved nails, and he pushes it to the same place as that hot, steady pulse of  _cascascas_.

            He’s not her Alpha, even if that’s what it feels like, she isn’t what he is ( _he_ isn’t what he is), and when he bothers to wonder what her parents are, he wonders if he was the one that killed them. One night he dares to ask Cas if he knows, and Cas looks like he’s not sure whether to tell him, which pretty much answers that question for Dean, and when he takes the kid for feeding that night he feels a lot like shit.

            Other times he feels almost normal (human), holding a baby for its bottle (blood) like he used to think only Sam would ever get to do (before he realized neither of them would ever get that). He remembers all the times he was embarrassed by his mom nursing Sam when they were out in public, and thinks that she would laugh if she saw him now,  _how’s that shoe feel on the other foot, huh, Dean-o?_

            “You’re getting too big for this,” he tells the kid on one of those times, ‘cause yeah, she’s thin as sticks but her legs still dangle over his arms when he holds her. She’s gonna be tall; he can tell already, ‘cause Sammy was like this, too. It pushes that tendril of a memory out in his brain again, sticking out and trying to trip him, and  _we’re not gonna do that,_  he sidesteps it, hollers to where Cas is lingering at the spring they found, “Get a move on, Cas, we don’t have time for you to powder your nose!”

            He turns back to what would’ve been their fire pit if they ever dared to light a fire around here, and Cas is suddenly there, frowning and looking faintly annoyed by Dean’s hollering. “I was getting you water to replenish your fluids.”

            Dean might’ve turned red if his body still did that. Because yeah, he been bitching about the kid sucking him dry and how he was probably gonna keel over one of these days, but he’d really just been bitching for the sake of bitching, but now Cas is holding some rough off-white bowl thing that looks like it might have been the top of something’s skull once, and it’s full of water that actually looks like water and not Purgatory’s version of Progresso soup.

            “Uh. Thanks.” He trades the bowl for the kid, who kicks one pudgy foot at Dean and nuzzles into Cas’s coat. “Ingrate,” Dean tells her without heat and takes a sip of cloudy water, trying to feel bad-ass for drinking from a skull instead of like a first-time mom whose husband made a midnight run to the store because she was craving ice cream.

 

\- o -

 

            “I need contacts,” Emma says.

            “What?” says Dad from the kitchen, where he’s distributing fried chicken onto plates. “Winchesters have perfect vision!”

            Papa ignores him, tilting his head to look at Emma. “Are you having difficulty seeing?”

            Emma tries not to look sneaky. Papa’s giving her what Dad calls The Laser Eyes, and they’re pretty good at telling when Emma’s lying. “Kind of?”

            Papa’s eyes get more Laser-y. “Emma.”

            “Please can’t I just get one pair, Papa?” she bursts out. “Savannah Elton got ones that make her eyes blue, and they look  _so pretty._ ”

            Dad is coming in from the kitchen now, wiping his hands on a towel and leaning against the doorway. Papa glances at him, then back at Emma. He looks puzzled.

            “Your eyes are beautiful, Emma. I don’t understand why you would want to change them.”

            Emma mumbles something, looking at her empty plate.

            Dad crouches down in front of her. “What was that, kiddo?”

            “I said Papa has blue eyes,” she mumbles again, only a little louder this time. “And you have green ones.” She kicks the table leg. “But mine are just _brown_.”

            Dad doesn’t say anything, just raises an eyebrow. He always says Papa has Laser Eyes, but Dad has, like, Laser Eyebrows, because suddenly Emma’s blurting out, “Ms. Mahon told Philip’s mom she thinks I’m not your real kid. She said I must be adopted.”

            Her voice cracks on the last words, and her eyes are stinging and then they’re spilling over and her nose is running and she’s hiccupping, wailing into Daddy’s shirt as he picks her up. She tries to pull away, but he holds her tighter, and that makes her cry harder because something deep inside her had been afraid he would let go.

            After a while, Dad says against her cheek, “That must’ve made you feel like shit, huh.”

            Emma swallows down a gob of tears and nods against his neck even though she doesn’t really know what  _shit_  means. There’s a hand on her back, rubbing gently, and she hiccups out another cry, hears Papa say,” Sshh, sshh,” and rub smaller circles than before. She hiccups again, this time quieter, and it finally feels like she can breathe again.

            “Listen to me,” Dad says. He’s holding her so tight, she almost can’t breathe again. Papa’s hand stills on her back, warm and heavy. “You’re our kid. In every single way that counts, you hear me?” When she doesn’t say anything, he pulls back, ducks his head to find her eyes. “Emma. Look at me.”

            Emma keeps her face hidden, whispers, “Then why don’t I look like Papa?”

            A moment of silence. She feels them looking at each other over her head. Then Papa says, “I’m afraid I must confess something, Emma.  _I_  am the one who was adopted.”

            Emma pulls away from Dad’s shirt to twist around and look at Papa. He looks back, hand still warm on her back.

            “Your father had you,” he says. “And later on I came, and I loved you both very much. So I asked him if I could stay and be part of your family.”

            Emma looks at Dad. He’s watching Papa, his lips parted. His eyes flick to her, and he looks sad and happy at the same time.

            “I think now it is your turn to decide,” Papa says. “Emma. Can I be part of your family?”

            His voice sounds the same as usual, but his hand falls from her back, curls at his side like maybe he’s scared. Emma feels scared, suddenly. She leans back in Dad’s hold, keeps one hand scrunched in his shirt and grabs Papa’s with the other. Pulls him in.

            “Family don’t end in blood,” she says, clumsy and uncertain like she’s remembering something she heard, somewhere. But there’s nothing uncertain about the way Papa hugs her, or the warm huff of air Dad breathes into her hair, like he’s relieved, as he tightens his arm around both of them.

 

\- o -

 

            When he comes to the next time, crawling out of a tar pit, the first thing he notices, after the hot venom pooling under his tongue, are the long claws curving from his fingers.

            He tries to gnaw them off with his too-sharp teeth. Can’t bear for Cas to find him, and see more proof of what he’s becoming.

 

\- o -

 

            They still won’t let her get contacts, but Dean lets her dye her hair—“It’s temporary, Cas!” he says when Cas makes disapproving noises about it—to match Cas’s. She spends Thursday night at Sam and Amelia’s place so Amelia can help her do it, which means that Dean and Cas haven’t actually seen Emma with her new hair color by the time they get a call from the principal Friday afternoon, informing them it’s not appropriate for an eight-year-old to have dyed hair at school. To which Cas snappishly replies that it’s not appropriate for teachers to gossip about his child to other parents on school property, and would he like to be put in touch with their attorney? Dean has to bite his fist half in glee and half in _my husband is so badass_  awe, and when Cas hangs up, a pretty epic make-out session takes place before Sam texts that he’s got Emma and they’ll be there in a few minutes.

            They’re waiting on the porch when Sam’s hybrid pulls into the driveway, and Dean blinks when he sees the little face through the windshield. Glances over at Cas, who is admirably straight-faced except for the microscopic smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

            “It looks really bad,” Dean whispers. Like,  _really_  bad. Tampa waitress bad.

            “Black does not appear to be her color,” is the most Cas will concede.

            Dean watches her climb out of the car. “Maybe we should just let her get the contacts?”

            The smile tugs harder at the corner of Cas’s mouth. “Or a trenchcoat.”

            Dean nearly cries, he laughs so hard.

 

\- o -

 

            During the day he can pretend. Kick up clods of dirt and track down things to kill to drown out the smell of the nearby pulse, its steady tempting thump.

            But night is stillness. The quiet of sleep and the deafening throb of pulse, as he lies in the dark and marinates in raging, aching thirst.

            Cas is careful not to come too close to him, now.

 

\- o -

 

            Cas feels it when they’re just about to stop for the night. Dean knows because he scents the sharp spike of terror and sweat, sees Cas’s eyes going wide and his foot faltering, legs buckling. He’s there before Cas’s knees hit the ground, yanking him up and shoving him forward.

            “Go,” he growls. Cas tries to plant his feet, eyes wide and white-rimmed like a horse hemmed in by wolves. Dean barely notices the weak attempt at strength. Knowledge is pounding in him heady and hard like Cas’s pulse; he knows,  _knows_ that if he dies this time he will come back the strongest he has ever been, bones of stone and fangs like steel, like the Colt; nothing,  _nothing_  that he cannot kill—

            “No,” the other breathes. He tries to push the child into Dean’s hold, babbles  _go_  and  _run_  and  _they won’t come after you if they have me_ , and Dean is growling, “Go,” and backing him up, away from the oily tang of predator, into a tree, he’s growling and biting the pleas from chapped lips for one long, short moment, and then he’s tearing his mouth away, and wrenching Cas to him by the collar and breathing venom-sweet into his face: “ _Go_.”

            Cas goes.

            And Dean.

            Dean whirls, and snarls, and rips.

            And dies.

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**iv.**

             The air smells of cold and damp. Rotting. A few pulses stutter around him. He crawls forward and sinks into one. It tastes so clean it burns, the untarnished copper of blood that has never touched air.

            The body sinks into limpness beneath him, cooling. He moves to another, pinning the body as it draws its first breath. Blood blossoms onto his tongue. He hums.

            When he is done, he opens his eyes. It’s dark, trees all around him, bodies all around him, and without the thirst searing his senses, he smells something. A wisp on something on himself. He looks down and sees a dark feather clinging to blood on the cloth he wears.

            Thirst explodes inside him.

            Then he is flying into the trees, leaves whispering beneath his feet. It’s night, and wind breathes around him, cold from the venom coursing down his fangs, the watering of his mouth. It’s night, and his prey is waiting for him.

 

\- o -

 

            “Go,” Castiel tells her.

            She makes a mewling sound like a wounded creature and presses harder against his knee.

            If Castiel could still fly, he would disappear from here, leave her alone beside the river. Another of Dean’s bodies is cooling far behind them, and he does not think he will be able to find his new body, this time. He has lost too many feathers, his wings little more than mouldering joints hanging from his back. The Leviathan will find him first, and he will not have Dean’s child killed by them.

            “Go,” he says again. But darkness is encroaching upon the edges of his vision, and a breath later consumes him entirely.

 

\- o -

           

            He finds it at the edge of a river. It’s curled up like something dead, its scent mixing with something familiar, and he plucks the feather from his sleeve, runs its soft tip along his smiling teeth as he creeps closer. Fear and grief leak from the creature as it sleeps, souring the scent. But they won’t touch the taste, it will still be sweet, so sweet.

            He stops beside it, kneels. Lowers his face to the carotid pulsing just beneath the skin and inhales. Anticipates the dark blood in the jugular that runs alongside the artery, the saltier string of the nerve. Opens his mouth to brush his fangs along the pulse.

            Then something small explodes from the creature’s side and slams into him.

            He stumbles backward with a snarl, crouching. The thing hisses back, crouched in front of his prey, yellow eyes burning in her face.

            Shock slams Dean into himself. He stares. Feels the dry blood caked along his mouth, inside the crevices of all that he is.

            Cas moans. He sits up slowly, his hand coming up to his neck. It comes away streaked with blood. Venom courses down Dean’s fangs, drips onto his tongue. The Amazon hisses like she can smell it, presses her back against Cas’s legs.

            Cas looks up. He breathes, “Dean.”

            Dean shakes his head. Stumbles to a tree and digs his hands into his hair, feels his knees tremble against his elbows.

            A hand catches the clawed finger he brings to his throat. “Don’t,” in that gravelly voice, and then there’s fingers against his forehead, and then nothing.

 

\- o -

 

            Whenever they go to the lake, they take Papa’s car because Dad says they’ll get sand in his baby and Emma hates riding in the Impala in the summer anyways because it’s black and  _hot_. Also, Dad won’t let her bring her crayons along in the car to color with anymore after that one time she left them in the backseat and they melted on the upholstery.

            That was not a very fun day.

            J.B. says the lake isn’t as good as the real beach. He thinks it’s dirty and gross with all the cordgrass and the creepy herons stalking in the water, but Emma loves it. Loves curling her toes in the dark slimy grass that grows under the water near the shore, and creeping as close to the ducks as she can before they quack and flap away.

            This time, she makes a beeline for a group of wood ducks floating just past the docks. She wants to splash them to see if the weird puffy feathers the boy ducks have on their heads will go flat the way Dad’s hair does when it’s wet. But she doesn’t even get past the dock before Papa’s calling, “Emma!”

            She looks over her shoulder, expecting to see Papa and Dad still setting up their towels by the dock. They always take  _forever_  to come into the water because they spend so much time putting sun block on. Emma doesn’t think it should take that long, especially since Dad always wears a white shirt over his swimming trunks anyways, but sometimes it seems like putting on sunscreen is Dad and Papa’s favorite part of coming to the beach, which doesn’t make sense  _at all_.

            “Emma,” Papa calls again. “Come back, you didn’t put on any sun protection!”

            Emma huffs and trots back out of the water.  _She_  doesn’t like sun block, how it makes her feel slimy and gross. But Papa’s adamant, and Dad’s grinning and saying, “Suck it up, kiddo,” so she submits to holding still as Papa sprays a coat onto her legs and back. He always takes a long time, making sure he doesn’t miss the back of her neck or behind her knees, and Emma wriggles her toes impatiently, making faces at the seagulls swooping close as Dad pulls a bag of chips out of the cooler Papa packed.

            Then Papa moves onto her arms, and a thought occurs to her. She gasps. “Wait wait wait!”

            Papa stops. Cranes his neck around to see her. “What’s wrong?”

            Emma slaps her hand over her shoulder so the sunscreen won’t be able to reach under it. “Okay, you can go now.”

            Papa tilts his head. He looks at her hand, brows furrowed.

            “So I can have a handprint like Dad’s!” Emma explains.

            Papa glances at Dad. Dad’s face is kind of scary, stormy the way it gets when he needs to talk to Papa alone. Emma lowers her hand. “Papa?”

            Dad blinks. “No, Em,” he says, eyes focusing on hers. His voice is still scary, rough like he’s been shouting. “You don’t want one of those.”

            Emma nods. Her throat feels tight.

            “How about we make something else?” Papa says quietly behind her. She feels him trace a shape along her shoulder blade, into the sunscreen already coating her back.

            Emma tries to twist around to see it, can’t. “What is it?”

            Papa traces the shape in the sand for her. It’s a word from one of the languages he’s been teaching her, the one he doesn’t teach to any of his classes. “Be…loved?” she sounds out, looking up at Papa to see if she got it right.

            He smiles. “Very good.”

            Emma beams, proud. “Give Dad one too!”

            Papa looks over at Dad. Dad looks back for a second, then shakes his head, hiding a smile, and scoots forward on his butt in the sand. “All right,” he says, leaning forward to bare the back of his neck. “Hit me.”

            Papa lets Emma draw the symbol on Dad’s neck where the white sun block has caught in little beads in Dad’s short hair. Dad complains that her fingers are sandy but ducks his head lower so she can reach. Emma does a really good job, Papa says so, says he couldn’t have done it any better himself. But she sees him stroke an extra line into the symbol anyway, as he gives Dad’s neck a kiss right above it, and she would wonder what it meant if there wasn’t a seagull landing on the open bag of Doritos and trying to steal them.

            “Hey!” she shouts, and behind her, Dad and Papa laugh.

 

\- o -

           

            He wakes first to hunger, the burning, thundering throb; and second to the sound of voices. Cas says, “Hand,” and a smaller, higher voice repeats it carefully: “Haaaand.”

            “Thumb.”

            “Thuuummmbuh.”

            Cas’s voice is weak, almost trembling. Dean pushes himself up, swallowing the hot fluid already pooling in his mouth. It’s still night but he can see Cas clearly; he’s bone-white where he slumps against a tree, holding the…the Amazon.

            Emma.

            Dean wants to ask if it’s really her, to be told that it isn’t. But Cas looks like chalk, his hand shaking where he’s lifting it to show the kid, and on the very edges of Dean’s senses, the scent that chased him awake hovers oily and sour.

            “Emma,” he rasps, and that question’s answered when she spins, eyes hunted and yellow and scared. “You gotta walk, kid. We gotta move, and Cas can’t carry you.”

            She doesn’t lunge for him, backs silently away as he crouches, gets his shoulder under Cas’s arm. Cas feels heavy and human, and for the first time Dean notices his smell is different.

            “Dean.” Cas’s voice is very quiet. “Please leave me here.”

            Dean ignores this, gets them walking. Cas can’t really hold his weight, his legs are dragging through the leaves, leaving a clear trail behind them. Dean finally hefts him into a fireman’s carry. Looks over to make sure Emma’s following. She is, at a distance, still guarded. But casting looks behind them; she can smell their trackers too.

            “Close to me,” Dean says tightly. “If anything happens, run. You hear me?”

            “Dean,” Cas mumbles again, trying to slide to the ground. Dean snaps, “Shut up, Cas” and tightens his grip.

 

\- o -

 

            They stop hours later, in a part of the forest where the trees grow huge as redwoods. Emma’s wan and stumbling, Cas hasn’t said a word in miles, and Dean’s blindingly, ragingly thirsty. He gives Emma a boost up into one of the trees with lower branches, then maneuvers up its trunk himself, gripping Cas awkwardly and too-hard. He lets Emma help him pull Cas onto one of the thicker branches and prop him against the trunk, then pulls himself down take care of the low branch they used to climb up so that nothing else can use it to follow them up. It splinters from the trunk with a satisfying crack, crashes into the ground below.

            He wonders if he should follow it. Tells himself like hell is a little thirst going to get him when he lasted thirty goddamn years in hell, ignores the voice that says  _only thirty._  Forces himself back up to Emma and Cas. Cas’s pulse is slow but still audible, still pungent. His eyes are open, half-lidded, he’s watching Dean as Emma burrows into his trench coat.

            Dean picks up Cas’s hand. Shoves it against his own sternum, trying not to think too hard about what he’s doing. Cas’s pulse bangs slowly against him, like something giving up on getting out.

            “Do it,” Dean says.

             _Do what_ , Cas’s eyes say.

            “My soul,” Dean says. “Bobby said it can juice you up, right? So touch it.”

            Cas’s fingers curl against his blood-stiff shirt. But he doesn’t do anything.

            And Dean knows why. Knew, somehow, deep inside when he saw the feather clinging to his sleeve, when he picked Cas up and he felt human-heavy instead of bird-light.

            “You can’t. Can you.”

            Cas’s hand slides from his shirt. His eyes slide away. Dean does, too, digs his knuckles into his mouth as the moon rises above them.

            Emma falls asleep, legs twitching, restless, but Cas doesn’t. His eyes stay on Dean, Dean can feel them, and he resolutely does not turn around. What he does, finally, is ask, “Are you dying?”

            Cas’s mouth rustles out something. Dean has to crouch closer to hear it even with his new hearing, braces his hand on the rough bark next to Cas’s leg.

            “Rest,” Cas whispers again, and his eyelids finally slip shut.

            Dean grips his arm. “You’re gonna wake up, right.” When Cas doesn’t open his eyes, he barks, “Cas!”

            Cas’s eyes flutter back open, startled.

            “You’re gonna wake up,” Dean grits out, “ _right_?”

            His eyes are already closing again as he whispers, “Yes, Dean.”

           

\- o -

 

            He must not have dreamed it, if Cas can’t do angel things anymore. But it feels like a dream, like the time Cas appeared beside him on the dock. It goes like this:

            “You knew.”

            “I knew.”

            “You didn’t tell me.”

            “I wasn’t sure,” Cas says. “I didn’t understand. How a child you had fathered could…”

            “Belong here?” Dean says bitterly.

            “ _Be_  here,” Cas says.

 

\- o -

 

            Cas wakes up eventually. Still weak and whey-faced, but alive. Able to move. They set off.

            Dean doesn’t talk to him about being human, or kissing him. Doesn’t talk to Emma about being his kid, or killing her. Cas can still only move so quickly, and Emma, despite being an Amazon, still has short legs, and Cas isn’t strong enough to carry her yet. Dean lags behind and goes ahead of them, loping circles around them, a sheepdog guarding his flock. A predator circling its prey. The distance doesn’t make Cas’s blood any harder to smell or hear. He exists in a constant state of hyperawareness, venom hot in his mouth and clothing too rough against his skin. He wants.

            At night, Emma clings to Cas like he’s her dad, climbs into his lap the moment he sits down and knots her little arms around his neck. Mashes her cheek against his stubbled one and watches Dean distrustfully.

            Dean’s fine with that, completely fine, okay, and he bites into his thumb, swiping the venom from his mouth quickly as it pools faster and hotter at the scent of his own blood, he’s that thirsty. Holds it out to Emma and ignores the swoop in his gut when she turns from it, buries her face in Cas’s coat instead. Licks it clean himself instead and manages to pretend he doesn’t care until after she’s snoring softly against Cas’s filthy shirt, these little snuffly breaths like she needs one of those gross bulb things he used to suck the boogers out of Sammy’s nose when he was a baby.

            “Does she remember?” he says. Cas’s eyes are closed, but Dean can hear his heartbeat; he’s not asleep.

            Cas’s eyelids drift apart. “Remember what?”

            “Being alive.”  _Dying._

            Cas doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he asks, “How long was she alive for?”

            Dean examines his hands between his knees. “Three days.”

            “She came for you.” It’s not a question.

            “Yeah.”

            Cas is quiet for another moment.  “It is the way of the Amazons. They consume the flesh of their fathers to come into their power from Harmonia. It is part of their pact with her. She derives strength from the flesh.”

            Dean spreads his fingers, watches the sheen of moonlight across the gray keratin at his fingertips. “So she needs to eat me.”

            Cas furrows his brows. “I don’t think so. Consuming their father’s flesh is what completes their pact with Harmonia and marks them as adults. Without it, she may age normally. As a… a human would.”

            “Why is she a kid?” Dean says abruptly. “She was sixteen when I—when she—”

            “You said she was only three days old when she died?” Cas says, and waits for Dean’s nod. “At her core, her essence, she is still a child. That is why she appears as she does here.”

            And why Dean is a blood-sucking monster. He nods, and slides down, off of the tree branch they climbed onto for the night. He sits at the tree’s base until dawn, listening to the quiet thump that seems tattooed onto his eardrums.

 

\- o -

 

            When they get home from the lake, Papa makes them hose off in the driveway to wash the sand off before they go in the house. He goes first and comes back outside with a bottle of bright green aloe gel to slather on the spots the sun block didn’t cover, like the symbol glowing pink on the back of Dad’s neck.

            Emma ducks away when Papa tries to put some on hers. Instead she runs into the house and climbs up onto the bathroom counter so she can twist around and look at her shoulder in the mirror. It stings, a little, but she pokes it anyway, until it’s a bright angry red that looks like it will never go away.

 

\- o -

 

            Emma sleeps when Cas is on watch and wakes up when it’s Dean’s turn, watches him with her sliver-of-yellow eyes from where she’s curled up next to Cas under his coat. Like she doesn’t trust Dean, and good, there needs to be someone between him and Cas-sucked-dry-as-a-corn-husk. Because even if he (tells himself he) could never do that to Cas, he never thought he’d dig people’s eyeballs out of their skulls, either, or breed a kid with a monster, and oh look, been there, got the t-shirts, so. I trust me less than you trust me, kid, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so if he starts to teach her how to pick her way through the leaves a little more stealthily, it’s for Cas’s sake and not hers, okay?

            So she picks her way around like a little ninja now, when she hasn’t puppy-dog-eyed Cas into carrying her, and one day Dean’s crouching to dig Anasazi runes into the dirt around their home-sweet-tree for the night because he’s been smelling a Wendigo on their trail for the better part of the day, and he could take a Wendigo with his hands tied at this point, but with Cas’s wings clipped, discretion seems the safer part of valor.

            Dean looks up to check on him, to see if maybe he need some help climbing the tree, and his eyes get caught on Emma instead. She’s crouched a few feet from him with her hands planted on her round knobby knees in a way so suddenly _Sammy_  that he catches his breath. She’s got that same perplexed frown as she stares at the runes Dean’s drawing, the frown that’s offended like the universe has gone out of its way to be hard to figure out. He’d almost forgotten what that expression looked like. It comes back in a rush of relief, other memories of Sam’s face, and it’s happy, but it hurts too. He says gruffly, “Go up with Cas,” and goes back to digging the runes into the dirt.

            But Emma doesn’t move. “Meee,” she says in her slow intentional voice. Sometimes he wonders if she’s purposefully trying to sound like Cas. An angel teaching a monster to talk, it’s so funny that it’s not.

            He ignores her, and she shuffles closer in the dirt, eyes gleaming and hungry.

            “Mee,” she says again, patting the ground next to the sigils hard. She reaches for the stick but stops before actually grabbing it, keeping her hand a few inches away from it instead. A creature telling her alpha what she wants but knowing better than to take it.

            “This is for big people,” Dean says.

            “Mee,” she says. “Neeeed it. He…” She stops, and he recognizes that screwed-up face, too, the one Sam got when he was a baby and Dad was feeding him applesauce straight from the fridge even though Sam hated cold applesauce and Dean had to tell Dad,  _No, Daddy, you have to heat it up in the microwave first, Sammy doesn’t like it cold_. Emma’s making that face. Trying to tell him something when she doesn’t know how to say it. He watches her, watches her put a hand to her belly and claw her hand around it, make a scooping motion. “ _Hurt_ meee.”

            And Dean understands.

 

\- o -

 

            He doesn’t teach her that night, but the next, after he’s crept out while she and Cas were sleeping and stripped the Wendigo’s flesh from its greasy bones, he sits her down and makes her draw sigils in the sand, over and over, until her eyelids are heavy with exhaustion, the way he remembers learning Latin with his dad. They practice every night, Anasazi symbols and demon’s traps, every sigil he can remember from his dad’s journal and Bobby’s books, and by day he looks more closely at the rotting corpses they pass, looking for small ones that might have Emma’s face.

            (He doesn’t see them, but now he knows they’re there.)

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

**v.**

            Emma gives them a hard time all day, holding tight to Cas’s coat and refusing to let go, to be forced to walk. It’s one of Cas’s bad days, he looks wan and his pulse is thready, alternately fast and slow, constantly snatching at Dean’s attention. Dean keeps having to swipe his sleeve across his mouth, to spit on the ground as they pass and ignore the hissing sound the venom makes as it burns through the dead leaves. Emma finally whimpers one time too many, and he snaps at her, and that makes Cas frown darkly, and then Dean feels guilty, which he shouldn’t, goddammit, and it’s when he’s stalking away, angry and half-hard with the anticipation of hunting down some creature and drinking it dry, that the shriek splits the air.

            It’s over almost before it starts, the whoosh of air, the slap of hot blood. The rougarou’s torn-open body crashing into the ground, its mouth falling open wet and gory with Emma’s guts.

            They bind up the pulpy mass of her belly, Dean ripping his overshirt and swaddling her in it, pressing down. But her eyes are already going dark the way they were before, the black spreading from them, and Cas isn’t saying anything, isn’t trying to get her to hold on, is just watching sadly, and dammit, this isn’t what’s supposed to happen, wake up, fucking wake  _up,_  Emma—

            Her heart gurgles, and stops.

 

 

\- o -

 

            They’re in the ice cream aisle trying to decide between cookie dough or strawberry when Dad goes still. He stares at the frosty glass door, and the blue grocery basket he was holding falls out of his hand. Then he’s turning slowly in a circle, eyes wide, and spinning, his hands going to his pockets. “No,” he says, then again: “No.” And he’s looking right past Emma, right through her, and then he’s running, shoving past an old lady by the frozen vegetables, boots skidding on the floor.

            Emma stares. And then grabs the basket and tries to catch up with him, trotting with the basket banging against her knees. She gets to the end of the aisle but can’t see him; she hurries down the linoleum, checking the chips aisle and the soda aisle, and by the detergent aisle her hear is starting to beat fast. She readjusts her sweaty grip on the heavy basket—Dad put a big package of hamburger in it so they could make cheeseburgers for Papa tonight—and bumps into a lady’s cart.

            “A _hem_ ,” says the woman, and Emma mumbles an  _excuse me_ , shuffles out of her way, face hot. Tells herself maybe Dad just had to go to the bathroom really bad. She lugs the basket to the back of the store, where the bathrooms are between the yogurt section and the fruit section, and waits by the shelf of Trix.

            She waits there a long time. So long that five people go into the bathrooms and come out again, looking at her strangely every time. She’s not supposed to talk to strangers, that’s Dad’s number one rule after diver picks the music and shotgun shuts his cakehole, so she shouldn’t ask one of them if her dad’s in the bathroom. But her arms are starting to burn. The basket is heavy. And she’s scared that Dad’s not really in the bathroom. But what if he is? What if his tummy’s upset so he has to be in there a long time?

            She waits until there’s no one nearby except an old lady opening up egg cartons to check the eggs for cracks. Then she sneaks into the boys’ bathroom, pushing the door open carefully. One time Keisha dared her to sneak into the boys’ bathroom, and she was too scared to, and now she wants to be excited that she’s brave enough, but she feels too much like crying when she sees that the bathroom is empty. Dad’s not here.

            She slinks back outside, and it’s bad timing. A manager’s coming out of one of the STAFF ONLY doors, and he gives her a Look.

            “Do you need some help, little girl?”

            Emma quickly shakes her head no. “I went in the wrong one,” she lies quickly, and darts into the girls’ bathroom. There’s a lady inside, changing a baby on the changing table. Emma quickly locks herself into a stall and concentrates really hard on the hook over the door. She tries really hard not to, bites her lip and squeezes her eyelids shut, but her nose starts to drip and then her eyes, too, and she can’t help it. She starts to cry.

 

 

\- o -

 

            Silence after they bury the body. No resting, no stopping. Dean ignores Cas, ignores his thirst, ignores the searing pain down his throat and the venom that eats like acid at his mouth. Follows his own scent of blood and fear and unwashed monster, tearing apart every rawhead, crocotta, and okami that gets in his way.

            The scent ends just past a bubbling tarpit full of writhing bodies that smell like they’re being cooked. Several tarry trails lead away from the pit, and the smallest leads to a copse of trees. One tree has clumsy shapes dug into the ground around it, and Dean’s ribs seem to crack in his chest. Emma is curled up on a branch and covered with black tar and smaller than he remembers, and he doesn’t wait this time, drags a claw down the inside of his wrist and presses it to her mouth.

            It takes a minute for her to respond, to open her mouth and begin to suck. When she does, one tiny hand comes up and curls around his fingers, like it did before.

            And that decides it, even if it’s his gut that makes the choice and not his head.

            He’s not leaving her here by herself.

 

 

\- o -

 

            Papa appears in the manager’s doorway, windswept and pale. “Emma,” he says in his most gravelly voice, the one that means he’s been worried, and Emma cries harder, curls around his neck when he kneels to pick her up. The manager’s saying something about needing to call someone to report this, and Emma’s so scared, so scared that she got Daddy in trouble and what if they take him away, and Papa’s saying something about “war veteran” and “PTSD,” and Emma just wants to go home, or to Aunt Amelia and Uncle Sam’s because they’ve never left her, never, Uncle Sam won’t even pull out of a parking spot until he’s made sure they all have their seatbelts on, and “Why’d he leave, Papa?” she hiccups. “Why’d he leave me behind?”

            Papa doesn’t say anything, just rubs her back, over and over. Sits in the car with her in his lap as he rubs her back and calls someone on his phone and she can hear Uncle Sam’s voice through the speaker, saying, “Cas! Did you find—” and then she pushes her ear against Papa’s neck to block out the sound because she doesn’t want to know what they’re saying.

 

 

\- o -

 

            Night, and they’re in another tree. If Dean was ever going to see the Impala again, he would swear he’ll never complain about getting cricks in his neck from sleeping in her ever again. But he’s not, so he closes his eyes and listens to the steady sound of Cas’s heart instead, absorbs the calm silence and the warmth of his shoulder against Dean’s because Dean’s not leaving this place, but Cas won’t be stuck here forever. Dean won’t let him.

            Too-small Emma flinches where she’s burrowed under Cas’s coat yet again, and Dean feels like the worst kind of fuck-up for hoping she’s remembering the rougarou, or the wendigo, or one of whatever other monsters managed to eat her here before that, instead of  _don’t let him hurt me_  and a gunshot.

            “We killed her,” he says.

            Cas looks up.

            “Sam and me.” Because it’s the truth, he’s good as guilty; he’d known she had the knife and he could’ve taken it from her; and he couldn’ve told Sam not to do it, but he’d just stood there and let his brother shoot his daughter in the back. “She came—for help. Said she wanted to escape. But—”

            He breaks off. Shrugs and knits his clawed fingers together. Looks at Emma scrunched up in Cas’s coat looking grumpy and tiny and more human than Dean himself, and wishes like hell she could get out of Purgatory because Cas would make a better father to her than Dean can ever dream of being.

            “I let her get killed,” he says lowly. “I’ll never be able to change that.”

            Cas touches Dean’s wrist. It’s a careful touch, light and gentle, and so is the kiss, lips meeting briefly and clinging together before they pull apart, eyes closed and aching.

            “Maybe you’re not here to change it,” he says quietly. “Maybe you're here to fix it.”

 

 

\- o -

 

 _“I_ deserved _to die. Now I can’t possibly fix it. So why did I even walk out of that river?”_

 

 

\- o -

 

            Getting out of Purgatory is easy. It’s too easy.

            That’s all Dean can think the whole time, through the etching of the last sigil and the blinding light, the bone-grinding grip he has on Cas’s arm and Emma’s head crushed tightly to his neck, the shudder of ground under his feet, the blue sky above them.

            It’s all he can think until suddenly there’s Sam, jumping out of a car, and Dean’s crushing him,  _crushing_ him in a hug because Sammy,  _Sammy!—_ and too late he notices that Emma’s begun to tremble violently against him.

            “Shit,” he says, and is that his voice? Where’s the rasp from the venom that has eaten away at his throat, where’s the no-longer-unfamiliar feelings of his sharp canine teeth brushing against his lips when he talks? He looks down, at Emma, at himself, and the claws are gone, his hands are  _hands_ , human and filthy, and Emma’s eyes are squeezed shut with no hint of red skin around them. He grips her harder, pulling away from Sam, and looks at Cas. Cas who has collapsed onto his butt on the ground and looks shocked, disbelieving. Dean grabs a handful of his coat, rocks down to his knees beside him. He can’t hear Cas’s pulse. Can’t smell him beyond from the dirty, unwashed stench of both of them. And he misses it, suddenly, clenches his hand in Cas’s coat and waits for a rush of venom that doesn’t come.

            “ _Cas_ ,” he says. “We’re—”

            Cas looks down at his hands. “Human,” he says quietly.

            Sam hunkers down beside them. And that’s when Emma explodes into motion, tears out of Dean’s lap and makes a run for it.

            Dean’s on his feet and grabbing her with a speed that’s slower than he’s used to, and Emma screams as he scoops her up, bares little-girl teeth and kicks and claws at him with fingers that are tiny and harmless where once they could draw blood, and it would be funny if he didn’t recognize the terror in her filthy face.

            “Let me take her, Dean,” Sam’s saying, and Dean sees the way Emma’s eyes go blind with panic, knows then that she remembers, somehow, exactly who killed her. Who sent her to Purgatory.

            He tightens his hands around her, but Cas is stepping between them, is taking Emma out of his arms, and she’s giving  a broken snotty sob, burrowing into his coat and clawing at his shirt like she wants to crawl under that, too. “Caa-haa-aaas,” she sobs in her too-high voice, snotty and gross, and Dean suddenly understands that there will be no easy way to fix this.

            Maybe no way to fix it, period.

            Getting out of Purgatory was easy. It’s being back that’s going to be hard.

 

 

\- o -

 

            Jody Mills shows up with clothing, and beer. She takes one look at Emma, clinging close to Cas and still refusing even to look at Dean or Sam, and kicks all the boys out of the cabin. Emma won’t have it, she screams and kicks and claws, and looks betrayed when her human fingernails won’t draw blood, when the teeth she clamps in Jody’s arm don’t even break the thin fabric of her sleeve. Eventually she just subsides into a curled-up ball, one arm clutched over her head and another over her stomach like she knows what’s coming and  _fuck_  if that doesn’t reach a fist into Dean’s guts and squeeze.

            He looks at Cas. Cas looks worse than exhausted, but he looks back at Dean, he rasps, “You should go with her.”

            And Sam’s supporting Cas’s shoulder, giving Dean a look that says,  _it’s okay, I’ve got this,_  so Dean goes inside with Jody and Emma and gets his first lesson in bathing little girls, how to cup his hand over Emma’s forehead to keep shampoo from getting in her eyes when they rinse her hair, how to gently rub the gunk from under her tiny cracked fingernails, how to drape a wet washcloth over her tiny shoulders like a blanket to keep her warm when the water starts to get cold.

            Jody talks in a low voice the whole time, encouraging:  _There we go, baby girl_  and  _Does that tickle? I think I see a smile!_  and other baby talk that has Dean blinking and biting his lip because he’s forgotten that Mom used to talk to him like that, forgotten the baths she gave him and the baths he used to help her give Sammy, in that big metal pan she used to cook the turkey at Thanksgiving.

            And at the same time he’s wondering if Lydia ever did this for Emma, if the way Emma’s staring at Jody with this look of half trepidation and half wonder that reminds him of Cas is because it reminds her of something she’d had done for her once, or because she’s never had it done for her at all.

            “There,” Jody says when she’s done, and Emma’s wrapped up like a hot dog in a linty old towel. “Now you boys take a turn, because no offense, Dean, but I’ve changed diapers that smelled better than you do.”

            Dean cracks a half-smile but glances at Emma, ready to say no if she looks on the brink of a freak-out. But she’s staring up at Jody with that awed look still, and looks quite content to let Jody begin wrestling the knots out of her wet, now visibly blonde hair.

            “Just, uh,” Dean says lowly as he turns to go get Cas, “Keep her and Sam apart, okay?”

 

 

\- o -

 

            He actually  _feels_  human again after a shower—with hot water, oh my fucking  _God_  had that felt good _—_ even though Cas used the last of the shampoo. Dean maybe should have shown him that you don’t need a whole fucking handful when he was giving Cas the Shower 101 basics, but now a wave of Pert-smell comes wafting off Cas every time he turns his head, which for some reason makes Dean grin stupidly, so whatever. Dean can deal with using soap in his hair.

            Jody’s gone out to buy baby stuff, and Cas is in the bedroom with Emma. Sam’s in the kitchen/living room/rest of Rufus’s cabin with Dean as Dean makes sandwiches, purposely being as sloppy with the mayonnaise as he can so he can lick it off his fingers.

            Sam glances at the closed bedroom door for the fifth time in as many minutes. Dean’s good mood is slowly evaporating. He doesn’t know if Emma can sense Sam’s attention on her, doesn’t know how many of her abilities or memories remain because somehow, she still remembers Sam, remembers enough to be scared of him, and if she’s scared then she won’t be able to fall asleep, and if she can’t fall asleep Cas will be stuck in there with her the whole night instead of coming out to enjoy some of Dean’s awesome sandwiches.

            “Dude,” he says, “eyes on me, I’m starting to feel neglected. You haven’t seen me in like five years.”

            Sam smiles, tense. He is bouncing his knee. “One year, actually.”

            Dean ignores the ripple this sends through him. After his half-a-lifetime in hell ended up being not even half a year out here, the news shouldn’t surprise him. Still. How old is he going to  _feel_  by the time he kicks the bucket for real? He pops a slice of ham in his mouth, moans orgasm-loud. “Mmmm. Meet any hot chicks while I was gone?”

            Again that tense not-a-smile. “So it’s really her?”

            Dean concentrates on cutting the crusts off one of the sandwiches. “Yeah.”

            “But— _how_ —?”

            He shrugs.

            “Well, what’re we going to do with her?”

            “I dunno, Sam. I figured I’d get her enrolled in preschool and start looking for car seats that don’t make the Impala look like a mom-mobile.”

            “Ha ha, Dean—” Sam says dryly, then stops. “Oh my God. You’re not being sarcastic.”

            No. He isn’t.

            Jody said something to him about Bobby’s place, how Bobby’d left it to them through one of their fake identities to circumvent the whole dead serial-killers thing. Dean had just shrugged, but now he can’t get it out of his head: the familiar salvage yard and wide-open blue South Dakota sky, the old workshop out back and the panic room underneath that survived the wreckage. He trusts Bobby’s place like he trusts nowhere else to keep them safe, and to keep other people safe from them if they need it, and he knows there’s an elementary school not far away because Sam went to it that one October when Dad was hunting a shifter. And getting the salvage yard up and running again is something he can do, easy. Sam’s been operating out of Sioux Falls, anyway, from what Jody said, and there’ll be room for Cas; he always seemed pretty fascinated by Volvo engines, and if that and the remains of Bobby’s library aren’t enough to interest him then maybe Dean can figure out some other sort of appeal.

            He will. He has to.

            “Dean,” Sam says.

            Dean clears his throat, spreads some mayonnaise a little thinner. “Yeah.”

            “Are you sure you’ve thought this out?” Sam’s wearing his empathy face, all creased forehead and wide-open eyes. “She’s…”

            “What, Sam? A monster?”

            “No! Well, yeah, that too, but—Dean. You can’t… _keep_  her.”

            “Is that so,” says Dean, and the knife makes a clatter when he throws it down on the counter. “So what do you want me to do, Sam, send her off into foster care? Yeah, that’d be a great idea, let’s send her off into the system with no idea what she is just like that fucking rougarou and go kill her when she starts eating people.”

            There’s a venom inside him he didn’t know was there, not even in Purgatory, because he’s pissed, fucking pissed, that he has to defend his kid to his brother. Can’t it just be enough that they’re  _family_?

            “Dean,” Sam says. Runs a hand through his hair, which is too fucking long. “It’s just—there’s a reason we killed her.”

            Dean snaps. “No. There’s a reason  _you_  killed her.”

            And that’s unfair, it’s fucking unfair, he knows, because after all he killed Amy, and dammit, he knows he can’t be a parent, knows he can hardly be a brother or a son or even a friend, because look at how badly he’s fucked all of them up: Sam’s hurt, betrayed look from the accusation Dean’s just thrown in his face; Dad burning in hell on Alastair’s rack; Cas bleeding through that trench coat, bursting into bloody pieces again, again, again, and God, there’s no way in hell or heaven or Purgatory that he can do this, that Emma won’t end up fifty times more fucked-up than she would’ve been if she’d never come to him in Seattle.  _The very touch of you corrupts._  What he looks like now doesn’t change what he is, what Purgatory showed he’s been all along.

            But he can’t leave her, can’t just  _leave_  her when twice she’s asked him to help her and twice he’s failed, when she hasn’t even asked him for protection, only for the chance to protect herself.  _“Just long enough so I can get away. Then I’ll leave you alone. I know you don’t want me.”_

 

 

\- o -

 

            Dad’s home when they get there. He’s hunched over at the kitchen table with his back to the door. The jacket he was wearing at the grocery store is torn at the elbow, his arm covered in dirt. Uncle Sam’s sitting across from him, saying something in a low voice as Dad rubs his face. He stops when Papa and Emma come inside, looking at them. Dad stays facing Sam, hunched over the glass of water in front of him.

            Emma stays behind Papa’s legs. Holds onto his coat, looks at her shoes. She doesn’t want Dad to look at her.

            “Dean,” says Papa.

            The scrape of Dad’s chair shoving backward. “No, Cas.”

            “We knew this might happen—”

            “ _No_ ,” Dad says, forcefully, and his boots thud into the kitchen. Papa carefully uncurls Emma’s and from his coat and follows. Emma stays where she is, staring at the carpet.

            Two big leather shoes enter her vision. “Em,” Uncle Sam says. She lifts her eyes to him. He’s crouched in front of her, eyes big and gentle. “I think you’re gonna stay with me and Aunt Amelia tonight. That sound okay?”

            Emma doesn’t say anything, just steps forward and lets Uncle Sam fold her into his arms, carry her outside. Over his shoulder she can see Dad and Papa’s silhouettes through the front window. Papa’s still and Dad’s in motion, spinning around, the snap of his angry voice almost audible through the closed front door.

            “He’s gonna be okay,” Uncle Sam says as the car pulls out of the driveway. “This happens sometimes. He’s just really scared because today it happened while he was with you. He’s mad at himself. Does that make sense, Emma?”          

            “No,” Emma whispers to the car window. In the rearview mirror, Uncle Sam’s face goes pained.

            “I know,” is all he says, and they ride the rest of the way in silence, Emma staring out at the streetlights.

 

 

\- o -

 

            When Dean jerks awake, sitting on the couch with a beer bottle’s neck gripped tightly between his fingers, he’s alone. Sam’s bag is still by the door, but the keys are gone, and so is the Impala.

            He should’ve just stayed in Purgatory. Let Cas and Emma come back on their own.

            “Dean.”

            He nearly jumps at the hand on his shoulder. Swallows, pulls himself up. “Yeah?”

            “Emma is asleep.”

            Dean swipes a hand down his jaw. “Okay.” Attempts a smile. “Thanks. For—you know.”

            “Yes,” Cas says. For a minute, that’s all, and they stand in silence. Dean misses the prickly pressure of Cas’s mouth, the warmth of his hand. Misses the sound of his pulse, too, and the smell of it, and hates himself for it. “She likes Sheriff Mills very much.”

            Dean gives a weak laugh at that, because if there’s anyone he’d like his kid to be like, it’s kick-ass Jody Mills. “Kid’s got good taste.”

            “Yes.” Cas looks pained. “Perhaps you could make sure that wherever you stay is close to her, so that Emma may spend time with her.”

            Dean rubs a hand down his face again. “Yeah. Uh, look. Figure I could take first watch, and you can hit the hay once you double-check to make sure I got the angel sigils right.” He forces a smile. “Sound good?”

            Cas hesitates. “Dean,” he says. “I must go.”

            Dean’s smile fades. “What?”

            “My brothers and sisters are waiting for me.” Cas attempts a small smile. It doesn’t look happy, but when has Cas ever looked happy? He ignores the voice that says  _when he kissed you_ ; it’s drowned out by heat under his face and along the back of his neck, by anger with himself for thinking Cas would want to stay, for imagining lazy mornings in Bobby’s kitchen and listening to Cas teach Emma how to read. Of course now that the Leviathan are gone Cas wants his Grace back, wants to go to Heaven to get it. To be a real angel again and help fix the damage he created, the way Dean—stupid, stupid Dean—told him he should.

             _Nobody cares that you’re broken, Cas. Clean up your mess._

            “Gotcha,” he says, and if his voice is rough it’s because he needs a drink. “Well. Have fun, I guess.”

            Cas is staring at him. If he hadn’t just as good as said he had no interest in sticking around, Dean might say Cas looked like he was drinking in the sight of him, but he just had, so he wasn’t. He turns away and clears his throat. “You gonna tell Emma goodbye?”

            Hesitation. “I think it’s better if I don’t.”

            “Nice,” Dean says, bitterness and venom all over again. “That’s fine, go ahead and take off on her like your dad did.”

            Cas doesn’t say anything, just continues to look pained. It pisses Dean off.

            “Get out,” he says. And when Cas doesn’t do anything, he snarls it. “Get _out_!”

            Cas leaves through the door. There’s a strange, exquisite justice in seeing him use the door one more time before he gets his angel mojo back and goes back to being a dick with wings again. But Dean doesn’t get to enjoy it, because he’s stalking into the kitchen and grabbing a Johnny Walker from Rufus’s stash and taking one gulp before spitting it back into the sink because he remembers he can’t afford to be drunk off his ass, can’t afford to be anything less than excruciatingly sober because he’s the only one here to take care of Emma. He’s alone.

            Maybe someday he’ll learn to stop expecting anything different.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**vi.**

 

            Some mornings Papa doesn’t feel well enough to get out of bed.

            Usually he’s the one who takes her to school, and Dad picks her up from Kid Care, but some mornings instead of Papa knocking on the door and saying, “Time to get up, Emma,” Dad sits on the edge of her bed and strokes her hair to wake her up.

            Emma always feels scared when she wakes up like that because she knows it means Papa doesn’t feel good. It means Dad looking worried and sad and tired, and it makes Emma want to hide until Dad looks like Dad again. But Uncle Sam told her once that when Papa doesn’t feel well enough to get out of bed, she has to be strong for Dad because it makes him really sad to see Papa hurting. So she crawls out of her covers into Dad’s lap and hugs him. “Chick-flick moment,” she says into his armpit, muffled, and he lets out a little breath, holds her so tight she almost can’t breathe.

            The hug lasts a long time, until Dad clears his throat and pulls back. “All right, kid, time to get ready for school.”

            When she’s dressed, she creeps down the hallway to Dad and Papa’s bedroom. She can barely hear Dad making toast downstairs, moving quietly like they all do when Papa’s not feeling well, like noise could hurt him.

            Papa’s back is to her, the covers pulled up over his shoulders like he’s cold. Emma stands in the doorway and wants him to turn around and see her but also doesn’t. She curls her toes into the carpet and whispers, “Papa?”

            He doesn’t turn. Emma curls her toes tighter and swallows and makes her way downstairs. Dad’s leaning against the sink, a hand over his eyes, but he looks up when she creeps inside and says, “Hey. Hey, baby, c’mere,” and she buries her wet face in his neck even though he has morning pricklies, and he rocks her until Uncle Sam’s car pulls into the driveway to take her to school.

 

\- o -

 

            The angels come after Emma falls asleep. Castiel has been waiting for them. He cannot feel his Grace inside him any longer, if any scrap of it even still lingers inside him, but he can still recognize Grace when he sees it. He knows that it was not luck, nor the vampire’s arcane summoning, that carried them out of Purgatory.

            They are in vessels, of course, and for the first time, Castiel cannot see through the human skins they wear to the entities underneath. Cannot tell which of his brothers and sisters have come for him. Only sees the moonlight reflecting off liquid human eyes, the starched shirts and creased trousers. He wonders if any of them are from his old garrison, are Sachiel, or Zadkiel, or Jophiel, and realizes that he does not know whether they survived his massacre of Heaven, if they were one of the bodies he left strewn in field of that man’s eternal Tuesday afternoon,

            “I am Zadkiel,” says one, as though it has heard Castiel’s thoughts (and of course it has). “I was in that human’s heaven, Castiel, but you spared me. Took only one of my wings instead of both.”

            The vessel’s voice is bloodied with pain and love as it unfurls it, as Castiel sees the terrible silhouette of a lonely wing, mangled and hanging like a dead creature from Zadkiel’s back.

            “I, whose Grace shredded alongside yours in Hell, I who grieved with you when Uriel’s treachery became known, I who followed you even against Raphael.” He steps forward. “I who loved you as a brother.”

            Castiel shuts his eyes. “There is no forgiveness for what I have done. I do not ask for it. But know, Zadkiel, that I am sorry. So sorry.”

            He feels, not for the first time, the unspeakable inadequacy of human words. Nothing could say how deeply he sorrowed for what he had done, how deeply he wished for the pain he had caused to be inflicted upon him, instead of those he had maimed and slain.

            “I know that you are,” Zadkiel says softly. He is close now, his words stirring the hair at Castiel’s forehead. He touches his lips to Castiel’s forehead, a benediction, and for a moment, something flutters within Castiel, something like worn leather and forgiveness.

            But Zadkiel whispers against his skin, sadly. “It changes nothing.”

            As the silver blade slips into Zadkiel’s hand, Castiel closes his eyes. He should be thinking of those he hurt, those for whom he deserves this fate. But all he can picture is a small hand curled around his. So much like the one that curled around him when he found that ragged soul in hell.

            There are things that Castiel regrets.

            Dean Winchester is not one of them.

 

\- o -

 

            Dean wakes to the jangle of keys. He’d fallen asleep in a chair in the bedroom, feet propped up on the bed where Emma’s tucked in neatly. She’s still lying in the exact same position as the night before, and that’s his first clue something’s wrong.

            His feet drop to the floor with a thud as Sam comes in carrying a box of donuts. He touches Emma’s face, careful despite the urgency. “Emma. Kiddo, wake up. C’mon.” He turns her face to and fro, taps on her arm, her cheek, then on a wild whim tries tickling her armpits, like that’ll do something.

            Nothing. She’s breathing, but she won’t wake up.

            “Okay,” he says, dimly aware of Sam moving behind him to the window. “Okay. Sam, gimme your knife.” His own teeth aren’t sharp enough anymore, he grabs Sam’s knife and ignores Sam’s alarmed look when Dean cuts into his thumb and holds it to Emma’s mouth, squeezing big beads of blood onto her lips, carefully cradling her head with his other hand to make them land on her tongue. But she doesn’t move the way she always did before, doesn’t suddenly shift and start sucking. “Shit. Shit shit shit—”

            “Dean!”

            “ _What_?”

            “This sigil—” Sam’s pointing at one of the blood-painted symbols on the wall. “This one isn’t a banishing symbol. It’s Enochian for  _sleep_.”

            Dean stares at him, still holding Emma. “Then what are you waiting for?”

            Sam licks his thumb, scrubs at the sigil. Almost instantly, Emma’s eyes snap open. Her head whips toward the window, and she’s scrambling out to Dean’s hold to it, like she doesn’t even notice Sam there. She slaps her hands and face against the pane.

            “Caa-aaas!” she shrieks. She whirls around, makes a grabby hand at Dean. “Dee-heen,” and it’s the first time she’s said anything close to his name, but there’s no time to untangle the balled-up knot of things it makes him feel because there’s angry tears running down her face. “Caa-aaas!” she wails again, and jabs her finger at the window as he comes closer, crouches next to her to look down.

            “Holy shit,” Sam whispers above him.

            Because there’s footprints in the dirt outside the window. Lots and lots of footprints, all different sizes, like a dozen people had stopped and stood two feet away from the window.

            And there’s one set that advances right up to the window.

            “Tooook,” Emma says, “Caaaas. Make Emma—” She screws up her face and closes her eyes , slapping her palm insistently against the sleep sigil Sam had smeared out.

            “Fuck,” Sam says. He’s pale. “Dean, you didn’t hear anything—?”

             _My brothers and sisters are waiting for me._

            “I screwed up,” Dean whispers. “I screwed up really bad, Sam.”

           

\- o -

 

            “—and then,” Dad finishes with a grin, “the carnivorous, rainbow-farting unicorn galloped off into the sunset.”

            Emma is laughing so hard there’s tears and snot running down her face. Papa’s shaking his head and grabbing Kleenex from her dresser, saying, “I don’t think that was an appropriate bedtime story, Dean, it did not make her sleepy at all.”

            Dad just puts a hand over his face and blows a humungous raspberry in reply. Emma falls off the bed in hysterics and slaps her hand over her face to blow one, too, and pretty soon they’re engaged in a fart-noise-making war that has Papa rolling his eyes and saying, “I’ll leave you two to it.”

            “Caaaas,” Dad whines. He’s a little breathless from all the raspberry blowing, his face flushed like Emma’s. “You have to come back, you know you do the loudest ones.”

            “The loudest flatulence imitations?” Papa says wryly, clearly unimpressed, but he sits back down on the edge of Emma’s bed where she and Dad are sprawled out. Dad nudges his back with his knee, and Papa smiles but says, “I’m not going to make the sound, Dean.”

            Dad glances at Emma, jerks his chin toward Cas. Emma understands.

            “Please, Papa?” she says as pitifully as she can. She pushes her way into his lap and pouts up at him. “Pretty please with pie on top?”

            Papa sighs. Puts his tea down on Emma’s nightstand. Then he puts his hands over his mouth and blows so hard that one of his eyes suddenly turns red, and Dad’s swinging Emma out of Papa’s lap and saying, “Oh shit, Cas, are you okay?” even while he’s laughing and Papa’s saying irritably, “I appear to have burst a blood vessel,” and Dad looks like he’s trying to make a serious face but he can’t; his eyes scrunch up and he’s exploding with laughter and hugging Papa and saying, “Sorry, baby, sorry, I’m not laughing at you, I swear.”

            And Papa’s submitting unhappily to the hug, brows all drawn and grumpy but putting his chin on Dad’s shoulder, and Dad says, “C’mere, Emma, and give Papa a kiss for making us laugh so hard even though it made him pop a blood vessel,” and then he’s off again, laughing so hard he’s doubled over. But Papa’s watching him fondly now, even smiling a little himself, and he puts an arm around Emma as she hugs his leg.

 

\- o -

 

            Cas doesn’t answer any of their summoning rituals. They try with his name, with Balthazar’s, Rachel’s, even Gabriel’s, and when those yield nothing either, Dean resorts to the names of angels he’s never met, ones Sam finds on Google and in the old musty books Jody brings from Bobby’s storage. It’s only when none, _none_  of them answer, that Dean begins to realize just how completely “Godstiel” must have devastated Heaven.

            Two dozen, three dozen, dead. A score. Two score. The number climbs higher and higher. So does the dread in Dean’s gut. He remembers Cas’s bees, Cas’s “pull my finger,” Cas’s sandwiches on shiny blue plates, and he closes his hand around his knife even though the summoning only needs a few drops, grips it and grips it until Sam takes it from him.

            Behind them, Emma watches.

 

\- o -

 

            Days pass.

 

\- o -

 

            Finally one answers.

            It’s when they’re down to a list on Google that Sam doesn’t think is real, mutters something about “no sources” and “probably from an RPG,” and Dean is drizzling the holy oil as thin as he can because they’re running out, running out, and Emma’s gripping his hand too tight, tighter every time Sam comes too close, her fingers digging into the bandaged cut around his palm. He doesn’t try to shift it, knows he deserves pain. He doesn’t want to talk to her, resents her a little, because if they hadn’t found her in Purgatory maybe Cas wouldn’t have lost his Grace and he’d have been able to fight off the angels and he knows it’s bullshit but he can’t stop feeling it anyway.

            Then Sam’s saying the incantation, and there’s a nearly silent sound of beating feathers, and Dean’s rib cage squeezes so tight it nearly splinters him in two.

            But it’s a teenage boy in the circle, pimply and looking terrified. The Wiener Hut cap on his head darkens with sweat as it stares at them.

            “I can’t be here,” it whispers.

            Dean ignores it. “Where’s Castiel?” Cas’s full name sounds weird from his mouth, for all that they’ve used it in the dozens of summonings, said  _Cas_  and _Castiel_  and even  _Jimmy Novak_  once in case it worked.

            The angel trembles inside the ring of oil. “Please,” it whispers.

            Something inside Dean hardens. “No.”

            He hands Emma to Sam. Pushes away her grasping tiny hands, her scream as Sam takes her and lets her kick and scratch at him but doesn’t let go. He knows his brother won’t hurt her again, and it’s time she learns it too. But that hitch just before she screams, that mute moment before a baby starts crying—he’d forgotten, forgotten how it makes your insides shrivel up waiting for the scream that comes scraping out of them like it’s their life clawing its way out through their throat. Sammy had done it, after Mom died, and that’s as much as Dean lets himself remember, gripping the angel blade in his hand and turning back to the angel.

            He says: “I’m only gonna ask  _nicely_  one more time.”

 

\- o -

 

            The torture doesn’t stop because Dean wants it to. It stops because he gets sloppy.  Draws too much blood, gets lost in the slippery grip and the scent, doesn’t notice it drip onto the floor, ooze across the holy oil.

            It’s enough to break the circle. There’s the smell of blood burning, and the angel stares at him for one instant longer through its remaining eye. Panting and _burning_.

            Then it’s gone.

            Dean steps back from the empty chair. His tongue flicks up to trace his teeth, and maybe he’s not imagining they feel sharper than they did a few hours ago.

             

\- o -

 

            “Dean,” Sam says one night.

            “Dean,” when Dean doesn’t answer.

            And finally, “This is wrong, Dean. She’d be better off with the Amazons than…” Sam’s quiet for a minute, looking at the newest angel Dean’s summoned from the list they thought was bogus. Its eyes are rolling in terror, “this.”

           

\- o -

           

            “Daaad,” Emma says one day, halting. “Daad.”

            That’s all.

 

\- o -

 

            Sam finds the article in the Pontiac newspaper. The body of one Jimmy Novak, missing person, long presumed dead, was found near Vermilion River. Police suspect foul play because of Novak’s long disappearance and suspicious markings found near his body. An investigation is ongoing, and anyone with information about Mr. Novak is encouraged to contact the police.

 

\- o -

 

            That night, an angel appears on Bobby’s doorstep. It’s holding a tan trench coat.

            “He does not deserve anything from me,” it says. “Nor from anyone. But what he asked was not for himself. Move aside, Dean Winchester.”

            It lifts a hand, two fingers extended.

            “Wait,” Dean says. Voice hoarse and low. “Please. Just—”

            The angel’s face twists in hatred. “What should I give you, beast that broke the seals of hell? That dragged the grace from my brother, that sliced into my siblings like they were souls on hell’s racks?”

            Dean tells him.

            And Zadkiel? Is merciful.

 

\- o -

 

_“Dean, you know, you’ve pulled some shady crap before, but this—”_


	7. Chapter 7

**epilogue**

 

            “All right, what is the  _number one rule_  about this weekend?”

            “No sex,” replies Emma dutifully, rolling her eyes. “Seriously, Mom, do we have to have this conversation in front of Dad?”

            “Yeah, I’d sort of rather not hear the sex talk either.” Dad heaves Mom’s suitcase intro the back of the SUV. “J.B., if you’re not down here in the next sixty seconds me and Mom are leaving without you!”

            “Dude, you can’t leave without me! You’re going to  _my_  tournament,” J.B. shouts from the porch, clattering down the steps with his cleats bouncing around his neck. He ducks into the car, shouting, “Bye, Emma, have fun sucking face at prom!”

            Dad rolls his eyes upward and shuts the back of the SUV, cutting off J.B.’s cackling. “Those are your genes,” he tells Mom, who flicks him in the arm.

            “Yeah, because ‘have fun sucking face’ doesn’t sound at all like something _your_  brother would say,” she says sardonically. “C’mere, Em, give me a hug before we go.” She wraps her arms around Emma, says in her ear, “Now, if you  _do_ violate Rule Number One, I expect to be told about it, okay?”

            Emma laughs and shoves Mom off, noting that Dad looks stricken. “I don’t think you’re doing your job right if Mom is that desperate to live vicariously through me, Dad.”

            “Ha ha,” Dad says dryly and clasps her in a one-armed hug. “Get in the car, we’ll drop you off at school on our way out of town.”

           

\- o -

           

             ”Have you decided what color you’re going with yet?” Julie asks as she pulls out of the student parking lot that afternoon. “I was thinking purple for my fingers and gold for my toes, to bring out the stitching on the hem, you know?”

            Emma’s rustling around in the duffel bag she’s brought since she’s spending the night at Julie’s after they go to get mani-pedi’s for tomorrow night. “Yeah, I think that—aw, crap!”

            “What?”

            “I forgot my wallet at home.” Emma puts on her best Pitiful Best Friend face. “Think you could swing by my house so I can get it?”

            “You are like the most high-maintenance friend ever,” Julie complains, but she’s grinning, so Emma starts to say, “whatever, you think I’m adorable.” But her phone starts buzzing in her pocket.

            She sees Dad’s icon on the screen, rolls her eyes at Julie, mouthing  _Dad_ , and picks up. “Miss me already, Dad?”

            “Heh,” he says, that exhale-laugh he does that always makes the phone crackle. “You know it, Em. Hey, uh…”

            Emma’s immediately suspicious. “What?”

            “It’s just, uh. Your uncle’s in town.”

            “What?  _Why_? I have plans for the weekend, Dad, I can’t sit at home babysitting Uncle Dean—”

            “Emma,” he says, a little sternly now. “I may have mentioned to him that it was your prom weekend. I think maybe he just wanted to be here for it.”

            “Yeah, and that’s not creepy at all,” Emma says under her breath.

            He hears her anyway. She can tell from the edge his voice gets, the one it always gets when she gets bitchy about his brother. Sorry, she can’t help it if the guy’s a druggie and a hick and seriously, Dad?

            “He’s your family, Emma.”

            “Your family,” Emma retorts. “Sorry, Dad, but I see him like twice a year, I don’t think that’s enough to qualify someone as family. I even see, like, Sheriff Mills more often than that.”

            “Emma,” Dad says, and now his voice is this mixture of angry and sad that makes her feel rebellious and ashamed all at once. “Can’t you just—”

            “We’re here,” Emma says, because Julie’s pulling into their driveway, and sure enough, there’s Uncle Dean’s ancient black car parked in the road. “I’ll go talk to him, but I’m not cancelling my plans with Julie to sit around and be awkward with him.”

            She hangs up without saying goodbye. Takes a deep breath and looks over at Julie, who’s giving her a sympathetic look.

            Emma rolls her eyes in response and grabs her keys and clarinet case. “I’ll be right back.”

            When she lets herself in the house, the living room’s empty. She sees what looks like light spilling from the kitchen doorway, and for a moment, she considers tip-toeing upstairs to her bedroom and tip-toeing back outside without going to let Uncle Dean know she’s come in. But Dad’s disappointed face wriggles into her brain and makes her sigh, and head for where the light’s spilling out of the doorway.

            He’s standing at the sink in his usual battered coat and jeans, holding something close to his face. When she knocks on the doorjamb and says, “Hey,” he jumps, stuffs whatever it is in his pocket as he spins around.

            “Emma!” His smile’s forced the way it always is, and she can see his pupils are dilated, even under the bright kitchen light. God, she really wishes she hadn’t come in. “Hey! How’s it going, kiddo?”

            She shrugs. “Okay. You?”

            His eyes light on the case in her arms; it’s like he didn’t even hear her. “That your clarinet? How’s band going, you gunning for All-State again? Those judges aren’t gonna know what hit ‘em, Sammy sent me a tape of your last solo—”

            “Uh, maybe,” Emma says. “Look, I was just, uh.” She motions over her shoulder, “Popping in for a second to grab something. I’ve actually got plans tonight—”

            “Yeah? Is it prom tonight? I thought it was tomorrow, I told Sammy I’d take pictures for him and your. Uh. Your mom.”

            “No, I’m just—you know, going out with Julie. She’s waiting, so…” Emma backs toward the stairs.

            “Does she want to go for dinner? I could take you guys for something, my treat—”

            “No, we, uh—her mom has plans to take us out.” Emma inches up the stairs. “So. Help yourself to anything in the fridge, though. Dad made really good lasagna last night.”

            She hurries up the stairs before he can say anything else. Uncle Dean makes her uneasy, always has, even before the summer when she was twelve and he came to their house wanting to take her on a road trip for the summer. Dad never raises his voice,  _ever_ , but he’d raised his voice then, she’d heard it through the door of his office where he’d asked Dean to step in with him for a second so they could talk. “You asked for this, Dean,” she’d heard him shout. “You fucking asked that goddamned angel for this, so you don’t get to—” And Mom had found her after that, pulled her away from the door and taken her and J.B. out for ice cream, and when they came back, Uncle Dean’s car was gone.

            She drops her clarinet on her bed, grabs her wallet from her desk. Heads back down the stairs, and when she reaches the living room, her uncle’s there, looking out the window.

            “Uh,” Emma says, opening the front door. “See you later, I guess.”

            “Later,” he echoes.

            Emma hurries down the front walk, lets herself into Julie’s car. She’s not quite sure, but she thinks she can make out her uncle’s silhouette through the semi-sheer curtains in the living room window. Watching them.

            “He’s kind of a creeper, isn’t he?” Julie says, backing out of the driveway. “Your uncle.”

            “The creepiest,” Emma says, and flicks on the radio as they drive away.

 

\- o -

 

            A few years back, one of the hunters in Garth’s network found a new use for the djinn toxin antidote the Campbells found. Mix it with some linseed oil, put it in a syringe, and bam! Supernatural opiate. You get all the effects of a djinn without being bled to death while you shroom.

            Dean scoffed when Garth first told him about it. But the scrawny little son of a bitch snuck a syringe and some vials into his shaving kit while he wasn’t looking, “just in case you need it,” his tinny voice had insisted over the phone, and when Dean found it, he looked at it for a minute, standing alone in the motel room with the single bed and  _not_  thinking about how if he ever ran into a djinn again he didn’t think he’d bother trying to escape it.

            A few weeks after that it was a Thursday night not far from Christmas, and Emma had her first clarinet solo since she’d made first chair. Sam had sent him the fancy Winter Concert invitation with its fancy-ass barely readable font, and Dean was wondering why the hell he hadn’t just gone like Sam had told him to, uncles could go to their nieces’ band concerts, couldn’t they, no one would think it was weird, and as he sat there wrestling with himself he glanced up from his half-eaten plate of fries and seen a tan trenchcoat, and for just a second he’d thought—

            But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. And Dean was so damn tired all of a sudden, and there was a bottle of Jack waiting in his duffel at the motel but eventually it ran out, and then he was too sloshed to get even the two blocks to the bar he’d seen in the way into town, and that syringe was sitting in his shaving bag, capped and gleaming and—

            He’d used it.

            Emma’s friend’s headlights pull out of the driveway. He watches them fade down the street. Steps away from the window and goes to his bag. He’s still got a few vials left, hadn’t planned on using them while he was at Sam’s, but the house is empty and he’s alone. No one there to catch him at it.

            A few minutes later he’s stretched out on the bed. Breathing deep and easy. It’s familiar now, like slipping into a pair of his old boots, like letting water close over his head.

            He dreams.

 

\- o -

 

            Dad finds her in the bathroom, perched on the sink counter like a monkey and twisted around so she can see her shoulder blade. She’s rubbing it roughly with a back scrubber, turning the peeling skin an angry red.

            “Hey!” Dad barks.

            Emma whips around, eyes wide. Dad seems to realize he scared her; he lowers his voice. “What’re you doing, Em?”

            She shrinks a little, pulls the scrubber from her shoulder so he can see it. The Enochian sigil Papa drew there for her when they went to the lake is there, barely visible beneath the skin she’s rubbed raw. Dad touches it carefully.

            “It was going away,” she tells him in a small voice.

            “That means it’s getting better,” Dad says. “It’s called a sun _burn_  for a reason, sweetheart.”

            “I don’t want it to get better,” Emma says.

            Dad snorts. “Tough luck, kiddo.”

            “Can’t Papa draw it on me again?” she says as he nudges her out of the way to get some Triple-A ointment out of the cabinet. “If we go back to the lake—”

            “Not gonna happen,” he says. “Sunscreen all over from now on. You keep getting sunburns like this, you’re gonna end up with skin cancer twenty years down the road.”

            She squirms as he slathers the cold cream on her shoulder. Juts out her lower lip. “I don’t care.”

            “Well,  _I_  care. And I’m your dad, so I get to do what’s best for you. Automatic dad privileges.”

            The lower lip doesn’t move. “But I want it.”

            “Well, your papa wanted whole wheat pizza for dinner, and he’s not getting what he wants either, so maybe you two can form a club,” Dad says with a smirk as he swings her off the counter and onto his hip.

            Emma glowers and suffers herself to be carried downstairs, where Papa is sitting at the table with his phone at his ear, saying, “Yes, all that, on whole wheat crust, please.”

            “What?” Dad sputters, letting Emma down and making a grab for the phone. Papa snatches it out of Dean’s reach, shouts “Thank you!” in the general direction of the phone’s speaker, and disconnects the call with an audible  _beep._

            “Aw, Caaaas,” Dad moans as Emma whines, “Papaaaaa. I don’t want wheat crust!”

            Papa raises an eyebrow. “As a father, I get to do what’s best for my family,” he says. ” ‘Automatic dad privileges,’ I believe they are called?”

            And he grins.

            Emma makes a face. Clearly, Papa overheard their conversation upstairs. She turns to glare at Dad because clearly Papa thinking he can get away with making them eat wheat pizza is Dad’s fault.

            But Dad’s not looking at her. He’s staring at Papa’s grin with that look he gets sometimes, his eyes big and shocked, like he’s not sure Papa’s real. And Papa’s grin becomes something a little gentler as he watches Dad back. He straightens in his chair and opens his arms, and Dad takes one step toward him, and another, touching a hand carefully to Papa’s face. He says, almost like a question, “Cas…?” And Papa holds Dad’s head too, cradling it in his hands, bringing him in for a kiss, and Dad mumbles, “Love you, Cas.” He sounds a little bit like he’s laughing and a little bit like he’s crying. “God, I really love you.”

 

\- o -

 

            It’s daylight when he opens his eyes. The bottle on the nightstand is empty. The syringe, uncapped in its case, is empty. And when he finally drags himself off of the bed and down the stairs to the kitchen where Emma stood just yesterday, that’s empty, too.

            He sits down at the table, remembers Cas sitting under him, holding his face, catching his kiss. Lips that were still warm from blackberry tea, calloused fingertips that traced the shell of his ear.

            Dean rubs the tiny dot inside his elbow until it is red and stinging.

            Then he grabs his duffel, and his keys, and leaves.

 

\- o -

 

_And if you say to me tomorrow,_

_oh, what fun it all would be_

_Then what’s to stop us, pretty baby,_

_but what is and what should never be._

 

 

 


End file.
